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The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes.

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
Habits
Depend
Habit
Depends
Eyes
Eye
Facts
Placed

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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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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Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine.
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The size of a man's income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any known fact of the world.
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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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While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.
Walter Lippmann
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So far as I am concerned I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it.
Walter Lippmann
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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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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
Walter Lippmann
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The mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation.
Walter Lippmann
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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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The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
Walter Lippmann
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No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.
Walter Lippmann
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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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There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.
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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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