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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
Politics
War
Political
Good
Men
Think
Abandon
Thinking
Notion
Begin
More quotes by Walter Lippmann
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
The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.
Walter Lippmann
It is easier to develop great power than it is to know how to use it wisely.
Walter Lippmann
Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
Walter Lippmann
Whatever truth you contribute to the world will be one lucky shot in a thousand misses. You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions.
Walter Lippmann
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
But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?
Walter Lippmann
Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.
Walter Lippmann
Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
Walter Lippmann
You don't have to preach honesty to men with a creative purpose. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate this product. The reason isn't because duty says he shouldn't, but because passion says he couldn't.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.
Walter Lippmann
It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.
Walter Lippmann
Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.
Walter Lippmann
Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are.
Walter Lippmann
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
Love endures when the lovers love many things together And not merely each other.
Walter Lippmann
Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind.
Walter Lippmann
When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
Walter Lippmann
The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
Walter Lippmann
