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Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.

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
Humans
Record
Men
Afraid
Records
Modern
Face
Faces
Past
Defeat
Human
Achievement

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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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Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern.
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The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.
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The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.
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Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
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There comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing.
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The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.
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A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.
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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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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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You don't have to preach honesty to men with a creative purpose. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate this product. The reason isn't because duty says he shouldn't, but because passion says he couldn't.
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Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
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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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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 prophecy of a world moving toward political unity is the light which guides all that is best, most vigorous, most truly alive in the work of our time.
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To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
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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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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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In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.
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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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