Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Walter Lippmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 23
Died: 1974
Died: December 14
Journalist
Politician
Writer
New York City
New York
Asks
Actually
Illuminating
Often
Counted
Felt
Named
Facts
Base
Thing
Saws
Opinion
Heard

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
Walter Lippmann
Image
We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes.
Walter Lippmann
Image
When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
Walter Lippmann
Image
A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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
Image
It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
Walter Lippmann