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Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.

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
Unless
Reformers
Virtue
Invent
Inspirational
Substitutes
Something
Virtues
Attractive
Vices
Fail
Failing
Reformer

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The size of a man's income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any known fact of the world.
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It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men.
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The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes.
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We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.
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When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.
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It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
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There is but one bond of peace that is both permanent and enriching: The increasing knowledge of the world in which experiment occurs.
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You and I are forever at the mercy of the census-taker and the census-maker. That impertinent fellow who goes from house to house is one of the real masters of the statistical situation. The other is the man who organizes the results.
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We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilisations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern.
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So far as I am concerned I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it.
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It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.
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It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
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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.
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A really good diplomat does not go in for victories, even when he wins them.
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We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.
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And the principle which distinguishes democracy from all other forms of government is that in a democracy the opposition not only is tolerated as constitutional but must be maintained because it is in fact indispensable.
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The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.
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You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
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Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
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All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
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