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

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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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Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are.
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Where love exists with self-respect and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that modern men are seeking to create.
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Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
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Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
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For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.
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The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
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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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Newspapers necessarilyand inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.
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People who are tremendously concerned about their identification, their individuality, their self-expression, or their sense of humor, always seem to be missing the very things they pursue.
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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 press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.
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The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.
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The consent of the governed is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.
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Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
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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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One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.
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We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
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To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.
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