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Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.

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
Important
Much
Democracy
Opinion
Public
Left

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
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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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The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.
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The invisible government [bosses] is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution. What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and are compelled to submit to it.
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Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
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It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
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The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.
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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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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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There comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing.
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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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When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.
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A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.
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All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
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The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
Walter Lippmann
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Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.
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The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.
Walter Lippmann
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What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
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