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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
Eye
Facts
Placed
Habits
Depend
Habit
Depends
Eyes

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.
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Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.
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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 self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
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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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The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.
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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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There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
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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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Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
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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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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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The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
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If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.
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The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
Walter Lippmann
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All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
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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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True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.
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The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.
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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.
Walter Lippmann