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A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.

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
Bigs
Presses
Great
Press
Privilege
Complicated
Media
Simply
Organic
Society
Urban
Free
Necessity

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The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.
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The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
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No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
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There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.
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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
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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.
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The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.
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It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.
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You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
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Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable.
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We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.
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Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
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A really good diplomat does not go in for victories, even when he wins them.
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All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
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In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
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Run against the grain of a nation's genius and see where you get with your laws.
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Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied.
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Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.
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There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation.
Walter Lippmann
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The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.
Walter Lippmann