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No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.

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
Hair
Charters
Democracy
Ballots
Education
Charter
Make
Illiterate
People
Primaries
Direct
Short
Amount

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
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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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A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.
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The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
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It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.
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Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied.
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If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.
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The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.
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When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.
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Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.
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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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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
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The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.
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The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
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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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It is all very well to talk about being the captain of your soul. It is hard, and only a few heroes, saints, and geniuses have been the captains of their souls for any extended period of their lives.
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Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
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The people who really matter in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule, or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat.
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Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.
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It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.
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