Quote

There comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing.

Walter Lippmann

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Walter Lippmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 23
Died: 1974
Died: December 14
Journalist
Politician
Writer
New York City
New York
Even
Fairly
Much
Average
Reformer
Men
Politician
Exhibition
Time
Politics
Exhibitions
Face
Reformers
Faces
Widespread
Comes
Compelled
Nothing
Suspicion

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

Image
A really good diplomat does not go in for victories, even when he wins them.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
Walter Lippmann
Image
It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
Walter Lippmann
Image
So far as I am concerned I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Only the consciousness of a purpose that is mightier than any man and worthy of all men can fortify and inspirit and compose the souls of men.
Walter Lippmann
Image
There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.
Walter Lippmann
Image
You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
Walter Lippmann