Quote

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
Real
Natures
Selection
Presidential
Figure
Figures
Personality
Call
Selections
Character
Interpose

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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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Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.
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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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The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
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There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.
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It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.
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A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.
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Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.
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Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
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A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting.
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The smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not be many idols left to smash.
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What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...
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The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.
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We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy's side of the front is always propaganda and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace.
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It is not the idea as such which the censor attacks, whether it be heresy or radicalism or obscenity. He attacks the circulation of the idea among the classes which in his judgment are not to be trusted with the idea.
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Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
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Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are.
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The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.
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Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.
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We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost. We must now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated.
Walter Lippmann