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No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the 20th century. Our ancestors know their way from birth through eternity we are puzzled about the day after tomorrow.

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
Ever
Average
Mariner
Human
Sea
Mariners
Humans
Birth
Uncharted
Way
Tomorrow
Puzzled
Century
Enters
Upon
Ancestors
Born
Ancestor
Doe
Eternity

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Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.
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Lovers who have nothing to do but love each other are not really to be envied love and nothing else very soon is nothing else.
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The consent of the governed is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.
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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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Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate.
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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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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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Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.
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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.
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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 best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
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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 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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For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.
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To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
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Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
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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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Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
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The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.
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When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.
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