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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
Lives
Saint
Soul
Souls
Period
Geniuses
Wells
Ambition
Extended
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Periods
Captain
Hard
Hero
Captains
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Heroes

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What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...
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The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.
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A really good diplomat does not go in for victories, even when he wins them.
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Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.
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The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.
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Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.
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The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.
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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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It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.
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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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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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The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.
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The host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples.
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A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.
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We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy's side of the front is always propaganda and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace.
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In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief
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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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Even God has been defended with nonsense.
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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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It is easier to develop great power than it is to know how to use it wisely.
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