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In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents.

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
Political
Court
Restless
Government
Mass
Trial
Vehemence
Always
Effects
Sentiments
Tenure
Men
Office
Perpetual
Offices
Public
Required
Constituents
Passion
Trials
Seekers
Sure
Sensitive
Sentiment
Lives
Effect
Sentimental

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There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation.
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A more conscious life is one in which a man is conscious not only of what he sees, but of the prejudices with which he sees it.
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Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
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Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.
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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 public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.
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We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost. We must now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated.
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The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.
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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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The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.
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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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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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The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.
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A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.
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The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
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Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
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Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.
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But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?
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Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind.
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Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
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