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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
Reality
Conditions
Fictions
Certain
Events
Aroused
Doe
Fiction
Powerfully
Enough
Feeling
Realities
Men
Anyone
Respond
Clear
Event
Experience
Mental
Feelings
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More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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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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What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
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Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.
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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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It was in the recognition that there is in each man a final essence, that is to say an immortal soul which only God can judge, that a limit was set upon the dominion of men over men.
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The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.
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Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
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Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are.
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For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.
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We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.
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There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.
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The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.
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The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.
Walter Lippmann
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I generalized rashly: That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon, then why act like a graven image? You are drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away.
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The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.
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Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
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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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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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To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
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We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
Walter Lippmann