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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
Generally
Politician
Trying
Philosophers
Politicians
Philosopher
Cease

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Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
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The American's conviction that he must be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell is the very essence of the free man's way of life.
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In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.
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Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, find reasons afterward.
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The prophecy of a world moving toward political unity is the light which guides all that is best, most vigorous, most truly alive in the work of our time.
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The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.
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The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.
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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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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
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To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
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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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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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In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
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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.
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When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.
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The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
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I generalized rashly: That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon, then why act like a graven image? You are drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away.
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There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.
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Run against the grain of a nation's genius and see where you get with your laws.
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