Quote

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

Walter Lippmann

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Walter Lippmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 23
Died: 1974
Died: December 14
Journalist
Politician
Writer
New York City
New York
Impossible
Law
Desire
Men
Abolish
Desires
Either

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

Image
Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
Walter Lippmann
Image
We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.
Walter Lippmann
Image
If all power is in the people, if there is no higher law than their will, and if by counting their votes, their will may be ascertained - then the people may entrust all their power to anyone, and the power of the pretender and the usurper is then legitimate. It is not to be challenged since it came originally from the sovereign people.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.
Walter Lippmann
Image
For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Love endures when the lovers love many things together And not merely each other.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
Walter Lippmann
Image
In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.
Walter Lippmann
Image
There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.
Walter Lippmann
Image
But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?
Walter Lippmann
Image
Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.
Walter Lippmann
Image
A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.
Walter Lippmann
Image
It is often very illuminating...to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?
Walter Lippmann
Image
It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.
Walter Lippmann
Image
In a place where everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks very much.
Walter Lippmann