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When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.

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
Philosopher
Cease
Generally
Politician
Trying
Philosophers
Politicians

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men.
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The mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation.
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Love endures when the lovers love many things together And not merely each other.
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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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So far as I am concerned I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it.
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One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.
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There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
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It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
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Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.
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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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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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A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.
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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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Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
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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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It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.
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Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant fail to use them and it is weak.
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The news and the truth are not the same thing.
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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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We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.
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