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It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men.

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
Desire
Men
Abolish
Desires
Either
Impossible
Law

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A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.
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It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
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The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.
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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.
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No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the 20th century. Our ancestors know their way from birth through eternity we are puzzled about the day after tomorrow.
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When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.
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The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.
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Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.
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The mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation.
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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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Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
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There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation.
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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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Where love exists with self-respect and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that modern men are seeking to create.
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In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.
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Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.
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Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.
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Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.
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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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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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