Quote

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

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
Picture
Head
Belief
Really
World
Captives
Experienced
Exists

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

Image
Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The first principle of a civilized state is that power is legitimate only when it is under contract.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.
Walter Lippmann
Image
No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the 20th century. Our ancestors know their way from birth through eternity we are puzzled about the day after tomorrow.
Walter Lippmann
Image
There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.
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
And the principle which distinguishes democracy from all other forms of government is that in a democracy the opposition not only is tolerated as constitutional but must be maintained because it is in fact indispensable.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.
Walter Lippmann
Image
One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann