Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Walter Lippmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 23
Died: 1974
Died: December 14
Journalist
Politician
Writer
New York City
New York
Accepting
Idols
Instead
Instrument
Idea
Instruments
Ideas
Whenever
Fruit
Worship
Accept
Plough
Authority
Idol
More quotes by Walter Lippmann
A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.
Walter Lippmann
There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
Walter Lippmann
We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
Leaders are the custodians of a nation's ideals, of the beliefs it cherishes, of its permanent hopes, of the faith which makes a nation out of a mere aggregation of individuals.
Walter Lippmann
Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
Walter Lippmann
The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
Walter Lippmann
The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.
Walter Lippmann
It was in the recognition that there is in each man a final essence, that is to say an immortal soul which only God can judge, that a limit was set upon the dominion of men over men.
Walter Lippmann
What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...
Walter Lippmann
The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.
Walter Lippmann
Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
Walter Lippmann
Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong where truth is poisoned at its source one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.
Walter Lippmann
The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal but ideas are immortal.
Walter Lippmann
Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.
Walter Lippmann
The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.
Walter Lippmann
