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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.

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
Mass
Distant
Hypothetical
Things
Media
Relative
Communicated
People
Suffering
Complexes
Dogmatic
Simple
Complex
Distortion
Often
Absolutes
Considerable
Truth
Radical
Unfamiliar
Great
Absolute
Suffers
Honesty
Masses
Made

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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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It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
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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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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 wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn't break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity.
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We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.
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When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.
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Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.
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The news and the truth are not the same thing.
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Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.
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The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.
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The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
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In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
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Lovers who have nothing to do but love each other are not really to be envied love and nothing else very soon is nothing else.
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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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It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it.
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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 essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.
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There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.
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