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

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All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
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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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All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
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You don't have to preach honesty to men with a creative purpose. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate this product. The reason isn't because duty says he shouldn't, but because passion says he couldn't.
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Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.
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The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.
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In a place where everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks very much.
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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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Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men.
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Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.
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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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Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
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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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He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
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Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.
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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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Politicians tend to live in character and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.
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Only the consciousness of a purpose that is mightier than any man and worthy of all men can fortify and inspirit and compose the souls of men.
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Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate.
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Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.
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