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Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.

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
Burdens
Routine
Appearance
Burden
Tired
Activity
Fall
Men
Slack

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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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While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.
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There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation.
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No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
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Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.
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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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The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.
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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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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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When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.
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The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
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Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.
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What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
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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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It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it.
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