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

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.
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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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Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
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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.
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Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
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A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.
Walter Lippmann
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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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Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate.
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When all think alike, then no one is thinking
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The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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If somebody can create an absolute system of beliefs and rules of conduct that will guide a business man at eleven o'clock in the morning, a boy trying to select a career, a woman in an unhappy love affair--well then, surely no pragmatist will object. He insists only that philosophy shall come down to earth and be tried out there.
Walter Lippmann
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The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
Walter Lippmann
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Only the very rarest of princes can endure even a little criticism, and few of them can put up with even a pause in the adulation.
Walter Lippmann
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Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.
Walter Lippmann
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It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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Newspapers necessarilyand inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.
Walter Lippmann
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The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.
Walter Lippmann
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Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable.
Walter Lippmann