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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.

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
Humans
Movement
Crowd
Democracy
Fears
Humanity
Crowds
Freedom
Individuals
Religion
Loves
Paradoxes
Faith
Democratic
Compose
Individual
Beings
Humankind
Human
Mankind
Paradox

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We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
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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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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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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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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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Even God has been defended with nonsense.
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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
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Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
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In a place where everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks very much.
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Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.
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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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Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
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There comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing.
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It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
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Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
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In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
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Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.
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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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