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Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern.

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
Without
Reporting
Reliable
Govern
Criticism
Intelligent
Cannot
Government

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A more conscious life is one in which a man is conscious not only of what he sees, but of the prejudices with which he sees it.
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In the end, advertising rests upon the fact that consumers are a fickle and superstitious mob, incapable of any real judgment as to what it wants or how it is to get what it thinks it likes.
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Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine.
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Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
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What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
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When all think alike, then no one is thinking
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People who are tremendously concerned about their identification, their individuality, their self-expression, or their sense of humor, always seem to be missing the very things they pursue.
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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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The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.
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There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation.
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A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.
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It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
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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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Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.
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Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
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Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
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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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Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
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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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No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
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