Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Walter Lippmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 23
Died: 1974
Died: December 14
Journalist
Politician
Writer
New York City
New York
Order
Justify
Truth
Errors
May
Serve
Tolerates
Men
Ground
Unexamined
Life
Lived
Unfit
Virtue
Socrates
Liberty
Tolerate
Belief
Error
More quotes by Walter Lippmann
While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.
Walter Lippmann
The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
Walter Lippmann
The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.
Walter Lippmann
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
Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
Walter Lippmann
Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern.
Walter Lippmann
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
What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
Walter Lippmann
Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
Walter Lippmann
Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate.
Walter Lippmann
It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
Walter Lippmann
Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.
Walter Lippmann
The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.
Walter Lippmann
What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...
Walter Lippmann
Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration.
Walter Lippmann
True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.
Walter Lippmann
The invisible government [bosses] is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution. What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and are compelled to submit to it.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.
Walter Lippmann
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