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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
Instead
Adopt
Democracy
Govern
Support
Occasional
Actually
Abandon
Freedom
Individuals
Individual
Notion
Must
Majority
People
Theory
Oppose

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The consent of the governed is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.
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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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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.
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A man cannot be a good doctor and keep telephoning his broker between patients nor a good lawyer with his eye on the ticker.
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Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.
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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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Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
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This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement - that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it - that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.
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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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It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.
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The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
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Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.
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The smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not be many idols left to smash.
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The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
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We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy's side of the front is always propaganda and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace.
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Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.
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Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
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The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.
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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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