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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
Reliable
Govern
Criticism
Intelligent
Cannot
Government
Without
Reporting

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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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Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.
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Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
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The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.
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Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.
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Lovers who have nothing to do but love each other are not really to be envied love and nothing else very soon is nothing else.
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The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.
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Successful ... politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.
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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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Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.
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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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In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
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Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.
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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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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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Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
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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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We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.
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To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love.
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Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
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