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A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done.

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
May
Strike
Done
Desires
Real
Strikes
Men
Rational
World
Defined
Balance
Acting
Decides
Desire
Prudence

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Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
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All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
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Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
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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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The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.
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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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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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Where love exists with self-respect and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that modern men are seeking to create.
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It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.
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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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The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.
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When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.
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Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind.
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The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
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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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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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