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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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Walter Lippmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 23
Died: 1974
Died: December 14
Journalist
Politician
Writer
New York City
New York
Politics
Purposes
Call
Minorities
Revolutionary
Society
Defined
Purpose
Democratic
Certain
Prepared
Might
Majority
Hymns
Always
Revolution
Minority

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In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents.
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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 devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.
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It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it.
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All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
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A more conscious life is one in which a man is conscious not only of what he sees, but of the prejudices with which he sees it.
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The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
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When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
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The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
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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 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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It is easier to develop great power than it is to know how to use it wisely.
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The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.
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Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.
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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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If all power is in the people, if there is no higher law than their will, and if by counting their votes, their will may be ascertained - then the people may entrust all their power to anyone, and the power of the pretender and the usurper is then legitimate. It is not to be challenged since it came originally from the sovereign people.
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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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The people who really matter in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule, or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat.
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The size of a man's income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any known fact of the world.
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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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