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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
Govern
Criticism
Intelligent
Cannot
Government
Without
Reporting
Reliable

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The size of a man's income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any known fact of the world.
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When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.
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Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
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A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.
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The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.
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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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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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In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents.
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The first principle of a civilized state is that power is legitimate only when it is under contract.
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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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So far as I am concerned I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it.
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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
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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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Where love exists with self-respect and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that modern men are seeking to create.
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A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.
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It is often very illuminating...to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?
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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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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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Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
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