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The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.

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
Comes
Libertarian
People
Nature
Bill
Also
Bills
Change
Subject
Majorities
Doe
Majority
Inalienable
Government
Subjects
Declares
Come
Liberty
Collectively
Things
Rights
Libertarianism

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents.
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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.
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There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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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
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The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.
Walter Lippmann
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It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
Walter Lippmann
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Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.
Walter Lippmann
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Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
Walter Lippmann
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Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
Walter Lippmann
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Even God has been defended with nonsense.
Walter Lippmann
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Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
Walter Lippmann
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The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
Walter Lippmann
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It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
Walter Lippmann