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

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind.
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He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
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Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.
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The people who really matter in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule, or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat.
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What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
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Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
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In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents.
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The first principle of a civilized state is that power is legitimate only when it is under contract.
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Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
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Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
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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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The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority.
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A regime, an established order, is rarely overthrown by a revolutionary movement usually a regime collapses of its own weakness and corruption and then a revolutionary movement enters among the ruins and takes over the powers that have become vacant.
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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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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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The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.
Walter Lippmann
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Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
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The news and the truth are not the same thing.
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There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
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All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
Walter Lippmann