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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
Much
Democracy
Opinion
Public
Left
Important

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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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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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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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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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You and I are forever at the mercy of the census-taker and the census-maker. That impertinent fellow who goes from house to house is one of the real masters of the statistical situation. The other is the man who organizes the results.
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Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
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I generalized rashly: That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon, then why act like a graven image? You are drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away.
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When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
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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.
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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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A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done.
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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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The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.
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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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It is easier to develop great power than it is to know how to use it wisely.
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To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.
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When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions.
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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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Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.
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The smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not be many idols left to smash.
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