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

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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 self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
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Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.
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Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.
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The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
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Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men.
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Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
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A really good diplomat does not go in for victories, even when he wins them.
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If somebody can create an absolute system of beliefs and rules of conduct that will guide a business man at eleven o'clock in the morning, a boy trying to select a career, a woman in an unhappy love affair--well then, surely no pragmatist will object. He insists only that philosophy shall come down to earth and be tried out there.
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You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
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Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.
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The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
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In a place where everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks very much.
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The invisible government [bosses] is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution. What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and are compelled to submit to it.
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The consent of the governed is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.
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Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.
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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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No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the 20th century. Our ancestors know their way from birth through eternity we are puzzled about the day after tomorrow.
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The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.
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Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
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