Quote

When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.

Walter Lippmann

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Walter Lippmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 23
Died: 1974
Died: December 14
Journalist
Politician
Writer
New York City
New York
Education
Funny
Everyone
Much
Thinking
Alike
Thinks

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

Image
You and I are forever at the mercy of the census-taker and the census-maker. That impertinent fellow who goes from house to house is one of the real masters of the statistical situation. The other is the man who organizes the results.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
It is easier to develop great power than it is to know how to use it wisely.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Run against the grain of a nation's genius and see where you get with your laws.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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
Image
Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, find reasons afterward.
Walter Lippmann
Image
A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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
Image
The people who really matter in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule, or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong where truth is poisoned at its source one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.
Walter Lippmann
Image
To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.
Walter Lippmann
Image
We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
Walter Lippmann
Image
You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
Walter Lippmann