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Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant fail to use them and it is weak.

Walter Lippmann

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Walter Lippmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 23
Died: 1974
Died: December 14
Journalist
Politician
Writer
New York City
New York
Progress
Symptoms
Movement
Movements
Use
Irrelevant
Social
Ignore
Instruments
Fail
Weak
Failing
Statesmanship

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The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.
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Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.
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The function of news is to signalize an event, the functionoftruth istobring to lightthehiddenfacts, toset them into relationwith each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.
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The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
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Leaders are the custodians of a nation's ideals, of the beliefs it cherishes, of its permanent hopes, of the faith which makes a nation out of a mere aggregation of individuals.
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The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being - which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs - where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.
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The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.
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When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
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In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
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Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.
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Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.
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There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.
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There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.
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Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
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