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Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.

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
Source
Desire
Power
Men
Ignore
Desires

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A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.
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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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We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilisations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern.
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The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
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Even God has been defended with nonsense.
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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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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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To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
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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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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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There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
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You don't have to preach honesty to men with a creative purpose. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate this product. The reason isn't because duty says he shouldn't, but because passion says he couldn't.
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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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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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Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
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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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Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
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Whatever truth you contribute to the world will be one lucky shot in a thousand misses. You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions.
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The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.
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To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.
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