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A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.

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
Last
Beliefs
Men
Certainty
Saving
Humility
Pride
Doubt
Belief
Reaches
Lasts
Acquired

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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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Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
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Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.
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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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A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done.
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When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.
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The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.
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The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.
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A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.
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The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.
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The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal but ideas are immortal.
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We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.
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The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being - which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs - where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.
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Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.
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Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.
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There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.
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When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.
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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.
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The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
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