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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
Despots
Democracy
Safeguard
Wells
Well
Benevolent

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What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
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The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal but ideas are immortal.
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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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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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The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority.
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When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.
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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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The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.
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It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
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Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine.
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The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.
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There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.
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The host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples.
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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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One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.
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The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
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We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.
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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 great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
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Politicians tend to live in character and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.
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