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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?

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
Asks
Actually
Illuminating
Often
Counted
Felt
Named
Facts
Base
Thing
Saws
Opinion
Heard

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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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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What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
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Even God has been defended with nonsense.
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Lovers who have nothing to do but love each other are not really to be envied love and nothing else very soon is nothing else.
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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.
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Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.
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There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
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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.
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The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority.
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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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Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.
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A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment.
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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.
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Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration.
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Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.
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The American's conviction that he must be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell is the very essence of the free man's way of life.
Walter Lippmann
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Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
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If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.
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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.
Walter Lippmann