Quote

A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.

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
Fact
Income
Incomes
Facts
None
Compel
Better
Increase
Distribution
Great
Function
Efficiency
Would
Members
Fund
Cutting
Acquire
Wealth
Useless
Diverting
Society
Useful
Impair

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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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The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
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Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.
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A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.
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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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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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In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief
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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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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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The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
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For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.
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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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We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world - introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably - that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves.
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The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.
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Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.
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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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At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.
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There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
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Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
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