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The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal but ideas are immortal.

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
Thoughts
Demise
Beyond
Mortal
Dies
Thinker
Ideas
Immortal
Men
Mortals
Time
Destruction
Thinking
Eternity
Reach

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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If all power is in the people, if there is no higher law than their will, and if by counting their votes, their will may be ascertained - then the people may entrust all their power to anyone, and the power of the pretender and the usurper is then legitimate. It is not to be challenged since it came originally from the sovereign people.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.
Walter Lippmann
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Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
Walter Lippmann
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Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.
Walter Lippmann
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It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
Walter Lippmann
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It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.
Walter Lippmann
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It is easier to develop great power than it is to know how to use it wisely.
Walter Lippmann
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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
Walter Lippmann
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Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
Walter Lippmann
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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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When all think alike, then no one is thinking
Walter Lippmann
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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
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The wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn't break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity.
Walter Lippmann