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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.

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
Bible
Serious
Democracy
Read
Determines
Book
Newspaper
Every
Conduct
People
Newspapers
Determine

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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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.
Walter Lippmann
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Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
Walter Lippmann
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And the principle which distinguishes democracy from all other forms of government is that in a democracy the opposition not only is tolerated as constitutional but must be maintained because it is in fact indispensable.
Walter Lippmann
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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?
Walter Lippmann
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Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
Walter Lippmann
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You don't have to preach honesty to men with creative purpose. Let a human being throw the engines of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty.
Walter Lippmann
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There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
Walter Lippmann
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Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
Walter Lippmann
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Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.
Walter Lippmann
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The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal but ideas are immortal.
Walter Lippmann
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There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation.
Walter Lippmann
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What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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In the end, advertising rests upon the fact that consumers are a fickle and superstitious mob, incapable of any real judgment as to what it wants or how it is to get what it thinks it likes.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann