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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

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It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men.
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Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
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A really good diplomat does not go in for victories, even when he wins them.
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The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
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Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.
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Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
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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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Love endures when the lovers love many things together And not merely each other.
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The size of a man's income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any known fact of the world.
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The news and the truth are not the same thing.
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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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But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?
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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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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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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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The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.
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What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
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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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No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
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Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind.
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