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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
Community
Lying
Means
Mean
Detect
Lacks
Lies
Liberty

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal but ideas are immortal.
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The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.
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The host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples.
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Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.
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If all power is in the people, if there is no higher law than their will, and if by counting their votes, their will may be ascertained - then the people may entrust all their power to anyone, and the power of the pretender and the usurper is then legitimate. It is not to be challenged since it came originally from the sovereign people.
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There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
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The invisible government [bosses] is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution. What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and are compelled to submit to it.
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The American's conviction that he must be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell is the very essence of the free man's way of life.
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Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.
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Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
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One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.
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Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
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We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.
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Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.
Walter Lippmann
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A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.
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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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Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
Walter Lippmann
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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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The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
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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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