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True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.

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
True
Opinions
Littles
Effective
Ideas
False
Little
Ones
Opinion
Justice
Known
Refer
Facts
Prevail

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Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.
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When all think alike, then no one is thinking
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Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
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Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their countrys sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.
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Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern.
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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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What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...
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There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.
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Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable.
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We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost. We must now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated.
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A man cannot be a good doctor and keep telephoning his broker between patients nor a good lawyer with his eye on the ticker.
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Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
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The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
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The consent of the governed is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.
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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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Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.
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Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.
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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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Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.
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Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
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