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

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In a place where everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks very much.
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Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.
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The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
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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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Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
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He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
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Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.
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If somebody can create an absolute system of beliefs and rules of conduct that will guide a business man at eleven o'clock in the morning, a boy trying to select a career, a woman in an unhappy love affair--well then, surely no pragmatist will object. He insists only that philosophy shall come down to earth and be tried out there.
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It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves.
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In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
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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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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
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If all power is in the people, if there is no higher law than their will, and if by counting their votes, their will may be ascertained - then the people may entrust all their power to anyone, and the power of the pretender and the usurper is then legitimate. It is not to be challenged since it came originally from the sovereign people.
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What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
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Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
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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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When all think alike, then no one is thinking
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There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.
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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 self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
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