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The consent of the governed is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.
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
Governed
Insurance
Consent
Tyrants
Ignorant
Democracy
Despots
Wells
Safeguard
Well
Benevolent
More quotes by Walter Lippmann
Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.
Walter Lippmann
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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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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What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
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A more conscious life is one in which a man is conscious not only of what he sees, but of the prejudices with which he sees it.
Walter Lippmann
Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.
Walter Lippmann
To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
Walter Lippmann
A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.
Walter Lippmann
We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.
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Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
Walter Lippmann
In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
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Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event.
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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting.
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The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
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The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
Walter Lippmann
Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.
Walter Lippmann
The people who really matter in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule, or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat.
Walter Lippmann
The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.
Walter Lippmann
What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
Walter Lippmann
