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To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.

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
Men
Monastery
Monasteries
Retire
Retiring
Pure
Faith
Keep
Better

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief
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The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.
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When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
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Politicians tend to live in character and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.
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We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilisations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern.
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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.
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In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.
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The function of news is to signalize an event, the functionoftruth istobring to lightthehiddenfacts, toset them into relationwith each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.
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The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
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Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
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Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant fail to use them and it is weak.
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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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No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
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A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting.
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Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.
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The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.
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It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men.
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Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate.
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It is all very well to talk about being the captain of your soul. It is hard, and only a few heroes, saints, and geniuses have been the captains of their souls for any extended period of their lives.
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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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