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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
Cease
Generally
Politician
Trying
Philosophers
Politicians
Philosopher

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A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.
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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.
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Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.
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A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.
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The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
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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.
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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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Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
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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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Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.
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In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
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A man cannot be a good doctor and keep telephoning his broker between patients nor a good lawyer with his eye on the ticker.
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Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.
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What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
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Leaders are the custodians of a nation's ideals, of the beliefs it cherishes, of its permanent hopes, of the faith which makes a nation out of a mere aggregation of individuals.
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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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There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.
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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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