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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.

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
Men
Ground
Unexamined
Life
Lived
Unfit
Virtue
Socrates
Liberty
Tolerate
Belief
Error
Order
Justify
Truth
Errors
May
Serve
Tolerates

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We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.
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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.
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The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.
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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.
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Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.
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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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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
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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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A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done.
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The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
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In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief
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It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men.
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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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Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
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The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.
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