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It is all very well to talk about being the captain of your soul. It is hard, and only a few heroes, saints, and geniuses have been the captains of their souls for any extended period of their lives.

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
Well
Ambition
Extended
Hard
Periods
Captain
Hero
Captains
Genius
Saints
Talk
Heroes
Lives
Saint
Soul
Souls
Wells
Period
Geniuses

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The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.
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A regime, an established order, is rarely overthrown by a revolutionary movement usually a regime collapses of its own weakness and corruption and then a revolutionary movement enters among the ruins and takes over the powers that have become vacant.
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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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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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When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.
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Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their countrys sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.
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We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.
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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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Politicians tend to live in character and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.
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We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.
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It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.
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Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate.
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Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.
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It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
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Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.
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Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.
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