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

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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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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Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.
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We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.
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Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.
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Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate.
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In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.
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The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.
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Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.
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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.
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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
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In a place where everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks very much.
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Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
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The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
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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.
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But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?
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Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
Walter Lippmann
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The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.
Walter Lippmann
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You don't have to preach honesty to men with creative purpose. Let a human being throw the engines of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty.
Walter Lippmann
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This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement - that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it - that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.
Walter Lippmann