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

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.
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To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.
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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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There is but one bond of peace that is both permanent and enriching: The increasing knowledge of the world in which experiment occurs.
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It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
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In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
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It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.
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We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy's side of the front is always propaganda and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace.
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It is often very illuminating...to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?
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Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern.
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We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilisations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern.
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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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A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.
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A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.
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The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.
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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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It is easier to develop great power than it is to know how to use it wisely.
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There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
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The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal but ideas are immortal.
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Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate.
Walter Lippmann