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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.

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
Error
Degree
Errors
Degrees
Highest
Mistake
Stimulating
Study
Introduction
Truth
Serves

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Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable.
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The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.
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The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.
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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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We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.
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There comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing.
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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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Love endures when the lovers love many things together And not merely each other.
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To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
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Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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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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When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.
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The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
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Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
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Only the consciousness of a purpose that is mightier than any man and worthy of all men can fortify and inspirit and compose the souls of men.
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In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
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Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.
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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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Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
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