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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.

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
Liberty
Distinguishes
Fact
Maintained
Government
Constitutional
Must
Indispensable
Opposition
Principle
Forms
Democracy
Tolerated

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Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration.
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A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.
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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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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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The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.
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The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.
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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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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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What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...
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What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
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There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.
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It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
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The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
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The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.
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Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event.
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Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
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The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being - which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs - where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.
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Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
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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.
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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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