Quote

I generalized rashly: That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon, then why act like a graven image? You are drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away.

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
Great
Drawing
Pretence
Writing
Notes
Puzzled
Never
Image
Utterance
Men
Sea
Delivering
Graven
Think
Building
Wash
Rashly
Thinking
Making
Kills
Generalized
Like
Away
Sand
Pantheon
Political
Absurd
Sketches

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Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
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Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
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Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their countrys sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.
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The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.
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Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.
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A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.
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The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.
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Only the very rarest of princes can endure even a little criticism, and few of them can put up with even a pause in the adulation.
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Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.
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All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
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What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
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This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement - that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it - that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.
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It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
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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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