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While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.

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
Freedom
Makes
May
Right
Important
Necessity
Beginning
Listening
Talk

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The news and the truth are not the same thing.
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The function of news is to signalize an event, the functionoftruth istobring to lightthehiddenfacts, toset them into relationwith each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.
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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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We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy's side of the front is always propaganda and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace.
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To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love.
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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.
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The first principle of a civilized state is that power is legitimate only when it is under contract.
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Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.
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Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.
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The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
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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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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.
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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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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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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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Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
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In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
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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.
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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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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.
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