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The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.

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
Men
Anyone
Respond
Clear
Event
Experience
Mental
Feelings
Image
Reality
Conditions
Fictions
Certain
Events
Aroused
Doe
Fiction
Powerfully
Enough
Feeling
Realities

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Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, find reasons afterward.
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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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The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
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When all think alike, then no one is thinking
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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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Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.
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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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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 can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
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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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What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
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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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Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.
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The function of news is to signalize an event, the functionoftruth istobring to lightthehiddenfacts, toset them into relationwith each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.
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A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.
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No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
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Politicians tend to live in character and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.
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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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