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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.

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
Talk
Abstract
Poor
Soon
Ideas
Poverty
Come
Theory
Much
Easier
Theories
Things
Pretty
Argue
Think
Results
Capital
Thinking
Rights
Arguing

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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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It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.
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The mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation.
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In a place where everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks very much.
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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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Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.
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It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
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The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.
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The size of a man's income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any known fact of the world.
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Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.
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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 unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.
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The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.
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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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Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.
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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 justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.
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A man cannot be a good doctor and keep telephoning his broker between patients nor a good lawyer with his eye on the ticker.
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