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You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.

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
Best
Machine
Even
Flowers
Machines
Plant
Inspire
Flower
Technology
Endow
Cannot
Initiative

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The news and the truth are not the same thing.
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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 search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority.
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There comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing.
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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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The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.
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The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
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Whatever truth you contribute to the world will be one lucky shot in a thousand misses. You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions.
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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.
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Newspapers necessarilyand inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.
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The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.
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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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If somebody can create an absolute system of beliefs and rules of conduct that will guide a business man at eleven o'clock in the morning, a boy trying to select a career, a woman in an unhappy love affair--well then, surely no pragmatist will object. He insists only that philosophy shall come down to earth and be tried out there.
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Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.
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We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost. We must now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated.
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Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant fail to use them and it is weak.
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The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.
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A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done.
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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.
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