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

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And the principle which distinguishes democracy from all other forms of government is that in a democracy the opposition not only is tolerated as constitutional but must be maintained because it is in fact indispensable.
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Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.
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The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes.
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Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, find reasons afterward.
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Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.
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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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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.
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It is often very illuminating...to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?
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If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.
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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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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.
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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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It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
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When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.
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Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.
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The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.
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The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
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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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When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions.
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Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.
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