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Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.

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
Friends
Established
Government
Governments
Ever
Corruption
Enemies
Destroyed
Institutions
Constitutions
Constitution
Weakened
Enemy
Corrupted

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Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.
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The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.
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The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
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The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.
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A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.
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The smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not be many idols left to smash.
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All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
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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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So far as I am concerned I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it.
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Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.
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Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.
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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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Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.
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It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
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A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.
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At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.
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