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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.

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
Party
Minority
Rather
Consent
Making
Experiment
Power
Minorities
Great
Experiments
Never
Sufficient
Coercion
People
Majority
Outrage
Necessary
Governing

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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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The invisible government [bosses] is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution. What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and are compelled to submit to it.
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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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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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We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilisations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern.
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In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
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The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.
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If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.
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Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, find reasons afterward.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.
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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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Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
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But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?
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Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.
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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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We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.
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A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.
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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
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The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
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For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day.
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