Quote

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.

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
Make
Diversity
Representative
Pick
Supports
Picks
Prejudices
Support
Casual
Class
Representatives
Upon
Tendency
Defies
Whole
Tendencies
Stumble
Mind
Prejudice
Sample

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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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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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 at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
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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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No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
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Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong where truth is poisoned at its source one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.
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Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.
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The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being - which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs - where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.
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The prophecy of a world moving toward political unity is the light which guides all that is best, most vigorous, most truly alive in the work of our time.
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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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Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.
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In the end, advertising rests upon the fact that consumers are a fickle and superstitious mob, incapable of any real judgment as to what it wants or how it is to get what it thinks it likes.
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Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.
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There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.
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Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
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Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.
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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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The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.
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Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.
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Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
Walter Lippmann