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

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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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When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.
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Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.
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We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.
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While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.
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The American's conviction that he must be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell is the very essence of the free man's way of life.
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The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.
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The size of a man's income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any known fact of the world.
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Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, find reasons afterward.
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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 disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
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It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men.
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A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.
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There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
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Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event.
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Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.
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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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