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A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.

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
Nature
Cannot
Become
Usefulness
Must
Cradle
Men
Useless
Life
Useful
Sleep
Whatever

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All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
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Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.
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The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
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Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.
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There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.
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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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A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.
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The smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not be many idols left to smash.
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It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
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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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There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
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Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
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Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
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Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate.
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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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The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.
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Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.
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