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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
Figure
Figures
Personality
Call
Selections
Character
Interpose
Real
Natures
Selection
Presidential
More quotes by Walter Lippmann
There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.
Walter Lippmann
There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
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
We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilisations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern.
Walter Lippmann
Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.
Walter Lippmann
The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.
Walter Lippmann
In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.
Walter Lippmann
To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love.
Walter Lippmann
A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.
Walter Lippmann
Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
Walter Lippmann
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
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.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.
Walter Lippmann
The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal but ideas are immortal.
Walter Lippmann
It was in the recognition that there is in each man a final essence, that is to say an immortal soul which only God can judge, that a limit was set upon the dominion of men over men.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
