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Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men.

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
War
Political
Good
Men
Think
Abandon
Thinking
Notion
Begin
Politics

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.
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When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.
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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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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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It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.
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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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The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.
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A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.
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The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
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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 effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
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There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
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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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Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
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The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.
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The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.
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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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No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
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People who are tremendously concerned about their identification, their individuality, their self-expression, or their sense of humor, always seem to be missing the very things they pursue.
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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
Walter Lippmann