Quote

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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Walter Lippmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 23
Died: 1974
Died: December 14
Journalist
Politician
Writer
New York City
New York
Authority
Idol
Accepting
Idols
Instrument
Instead
Instruments
Idea
Whenever
Ideas
Fruit
Worship
Accept
Plough

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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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Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their countrys sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.
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You don't have to preach honesty to men with a creative purpose. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate this product. The reason isn't because duty says he shouldn't, but because passion says he couldn't.
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The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.
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We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.
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When all think alike, then no one is thinking
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Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.
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This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement - that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it - that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.
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The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.
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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.
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Men can know more than their ancestors did if they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors had already learned....That is why a society can be progressive only if it conserves its traditions.
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There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.
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A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done.
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Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
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In the end, advertising rests upon the fact that consumers are a fickle and superstitious mob, incapable of any real judgment as to what it wants or how it is to get what it thinks it likes.
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The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.
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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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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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Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
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Lovers who have nothing to do but love each other are not really to be envied love and nothing else very soon is nothing else.
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