Quote

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

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
Freedom
Makes
May
Right
Important
Necessity
Beginning
Listening
Talk

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

Image
It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it.
Walter Lippmann
Image
For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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
Image
Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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
Image
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
Walter Lippmann
Image
A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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
Image
The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
Walter Lippmann