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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.
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
Democracy
Govern
Support
Occasional
Actually
Abandon
Freedom
Individuals
Individual
Notion
Must
Majority
People
Theory
Oppose
Instead
Adopt
More quotes by Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
Walter Lippmann
The function of news is to signalize an event, the functionoftruth istobring to lightthehiddenfacts, toset them into relationwith each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.
Walter Lippmann
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
It was in the recognition that there is in each man a final essence, that is to say an immortal soul which only God can judge, that a limit was set upon the dominion of men over men.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.
Walter Lippmann
People who are tremendously concerned about their identification, their individuality, their self-expression, or their sense of humor, always seem to be missing the very things they pursue.
Walter Lippmann
The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.
Walter Lippmann
It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
Walter Lippmann
True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.
Walter Lippmann
Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
Walter Lippmann
Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
Walter Lippmann
