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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

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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
Head
Belief
Really
World
Captives
Experienced
Exists
Picture

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
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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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Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
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Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
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Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event.
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The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.
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Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.
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We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.
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Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.
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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
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It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it.
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The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.
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When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.
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The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being - which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs - where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.
Walter Lippmann
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A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting.
Walter Lippmann
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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
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There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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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
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In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents.
Walter Lippmann