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Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.

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
Character
Interpose
Real
Natures
Selection
Presidential
Figure
Figures
Personality
Call
Selections

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Love endures when the lovers love many things together And not merely each other.
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Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
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It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves.
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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.
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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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The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.
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Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.
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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.
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It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
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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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Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event.
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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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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 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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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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The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
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Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied.
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Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men.
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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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There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.
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