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Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.

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
Habit
Ancestor
Records
Imitation
Almost
Habits
Nothing
Machine
Made
Machines
Always
Tradition
Record
Created
Ancestors

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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.
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When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.
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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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In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief
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The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.
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Newspapers necessarilyand inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.
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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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Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.
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Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
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Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.
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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.
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A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.
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One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.
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All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
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There is but one bond of peace that is both permanent and enriching: The increasing knowledge of the world in which experiment occurs.
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The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.
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Even God has been defended with nonsense.
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The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.
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It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.
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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.
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