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Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.

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
Government
Good
Always
Proved
Guarantee
Guarantees
Popular
Everywhere

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Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.
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A regime, an established order, is rarely overthrown by a revolutionary movement usually a regime collapses of its own weakness and corruption and then a revolutionary movement enters among the ruins and takes over the powers that have become vacant.
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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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No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the 20th century. Our ancestors know their way from birth through eternity we are puzzled about the day after tomorrow.
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Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
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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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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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A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment.
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Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
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The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.
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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.
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Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
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You don't have to preach honesty to men with creative purpose. Let a human being throw the engines of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty.
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Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
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We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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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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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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Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.
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The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.
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