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

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions.
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There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.
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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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A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.
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To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.
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We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.
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We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.
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Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
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There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.
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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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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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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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It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
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Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant fail to use them and it is weak.
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The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.
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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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Men can know more than their ancestors did if they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors had already learned....That is why a society can be progressive only if it conserves its traditions.
Walter Lippmann
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Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
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The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.
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You don't have to preach honesty to men with a creative purpose. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate this product. The reason isn't because duty says he shouldn't, but because passion says he couldn't.
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