Quote

Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.

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
Easier
Philosophy
Trouble
True
Nothing
Make
Simplified
Life
Resulting
Simplify

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Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.
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Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, find reasons afterward.
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The consent of the governed is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.
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There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.
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The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.
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When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.
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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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Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.
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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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There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
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I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.
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The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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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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The first principle of a civilized state is that power is legitimate only when it is under contract.
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Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
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