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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
Reporting
Reliable
Govern
Criticism
Intelligent
Cannot
Government
Without

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The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.
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You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
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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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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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No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the 20th century. Our ancestors know their way from birth through eternity we are puzzled about the day after tomorrow.
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The news and the truth are not the same thing.
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But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?
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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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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
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In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
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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.
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A regime, an established order, is rarely overthrown by a revolutionary movement usually a regime collapses of its own weakness and corruption and then a revolutionary movement enters among the ruins and takes over the powers that have become vacant.
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While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.
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Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
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It is easier to develop great power than it is to know how to use it wisely.
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The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
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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.
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It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves.
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What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
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A really good diplomat does not go in for victories, even when he wins them.
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