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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
Insurance
Consent
Tyrants
Ignorant
Democracy
Despots
Wells
Safeguard
Well
Benevolent
Governed

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.
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The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.
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It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves.
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When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.
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The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes.
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Run against the grain of a nation's genius and see where you get with your laws.
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It was in the recognition that there is in each man a final essence, that is to say an immortal soul which only God can judge, that a limit was set upon the dominion of men over men.
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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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The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
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If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.
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A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.
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For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day.
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A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.
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The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.
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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.
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When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
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What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...
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Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
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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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Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
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