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Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

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
Must
Every
Men
Pool
Think
Whose
Thinking
Silence
Create
Business
Part

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Only the very rarest of princes can endure even a little criticism, and few of them can put up with even a pause in the adulation.
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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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When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.
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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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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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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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What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
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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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All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
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Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind.
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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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Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration.
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Love endures when the lovers love many things together And not merely each other.
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When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
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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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You don't have to preach honesty to men with creative purpose. Let a human being throw the engines of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty.
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Only the consciousness of a purpose that is mightier than any man and worthy of all men can fortify and inspirit and compose the souls of men.
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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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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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The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
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