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Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.

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
Intelligent
Muffled
Persons
Respectability
Soul
Trivial
Person
Mediocre
Every
Bent
Fairly
Price
Aware

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Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
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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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For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day.
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The people who really matter in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule, or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat.
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When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions.
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The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
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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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Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.
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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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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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The function of news is to signalize an event, the functionoftruth istobring to lightthehiddenfacts, toset them into relationwith each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.
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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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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.
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Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied.
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You and I are forever at the mercy of the census-taker and the census-maker. That impertinent fellow who goes from house to house is one of the real masters of the statistical situation. The other is the man who organizes the results.
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Men can know more than their ancestors did if they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors had already learned....That is why a society can be progressive only if it conserves its traditions.
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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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A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.
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A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment.
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Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
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