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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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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In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
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The invisible government [bosses] is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution. What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and are compelled to submit to it.
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When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.
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Even God has been defended with nonsense.
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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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When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
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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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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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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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The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.
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Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
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The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.
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The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.
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Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.
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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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