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Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.
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
Great
Even
Men
Fictitious
Lifetime
Personality
Usually
Public
Known
More quotes by Walter Lippmann
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
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.
Walter Lippmann
While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.
Walter Lippmann
There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
Walter Lippmann
There comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing.
Walter Lippmann
We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
Walter Lippmann
Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.
Walter Lippmann
Successful ... politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.
Walter Lippmann
Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
Walter Lippmann
It was in the recognition that there is in each man a final essence, that is to say an immortal soul which only God can judge, that a limit was set upon the dominion of men over men.
Walter Lippmann
For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.
Walter Lippmann
When all think alike, then no one is thinking
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
Walter Lippmann
The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.
Walter Lippmann
I generalized rashly: That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon, then why act like a graven image? You are drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away.
Walter Lippmann
Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.
Walter Lippmann
When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
Walter Lippmann
To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
Walter Lippmann
The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.
Walter Lippmann
