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We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.

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
Affairs
Affair
Private
Concerned
Ones
Public
Immersed

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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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.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
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The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.
Walter Lippmann
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The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.
Walter Lippmann
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Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant fail to use them and it is weak.
Walter Lippmann
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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
Walter Lippmann
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Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.
Walter Lippmann
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When all think alike, then no one is thinking
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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The function of news is to signalize an event, the functionoftruth istobring to lightthehiddenfacts, toset them into relationwith each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.
Walter Lippmann
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The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.
Walter Lippmann
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Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.
Walter Lippmann