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

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It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
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Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern.
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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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For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day.
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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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The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
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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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Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.
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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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Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.
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Politicians tend to live in character and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.
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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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Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
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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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Men can know more than their ancestors did if they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors had already learned....That is why a society can be progressive only if it conserves its traditions.
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The wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn't break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity.
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The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
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We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.
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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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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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