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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
Proved
Guarantee
Guarantees
Popular
Everywhere
Government
Good
Always

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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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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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Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied.
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Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.
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We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
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There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.
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Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.
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Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable.
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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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Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
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It is not the idea as such which the censor attacks, whether it be heresy or radicalism or obscenity. He attacks the circulation of the idea among the classes which in his judgment are not to be trusted with the idea.
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A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.
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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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Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are.
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The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.
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Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant fail to use them and it is weak.
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We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.
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He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
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The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.
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Love endures when the lovers love many things together And not merely each other.
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