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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
Abolish
Desires
Either
Impossible
Law
Desire
Men

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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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Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
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Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.
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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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Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.
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To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love.
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Even God has been defended with nonsense.
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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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Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men.
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When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.
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Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
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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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Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.
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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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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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It is not the idea as such which the censor attacks, whether it be heresy or radicalism or obscenity. He attacks the circulation of the idea among the classes which in his judgment are not to be trusted with the idea.
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It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
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The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.
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Only the very rarest of princes can endure even a little criticism, and few of them can put up with even a pause in the adulation.
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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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