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There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.

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
Mean
Detect
Lacks
Lies
Liberty
Community
Lying
Means

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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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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When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.
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At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.
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The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
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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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Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, find reasons afterward.
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You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
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Successful ... politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.
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He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
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Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration.
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Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
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You don't have to preach honesty to men with creative purpose. Let a human being throw the engines of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty.
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Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.
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The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.
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For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.
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There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.
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We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.
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Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.
Walter Lippmann
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We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world - introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably - that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves.
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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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