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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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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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Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.
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Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.
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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 thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal but ideas are immortal.
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The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.
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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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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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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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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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Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.
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Run against the grain of a nation's genius and see where you get with your laws.
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Politicians tend to live in character and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.
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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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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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There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
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Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.
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The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes.
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