Quote

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.

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
Ideas
Finals
Disastrous
Nothing
Forgiving
Regards
Self
Easily
Skepticism
Always
Train
Deception
Think
Regard
Sooner
Thinking
Evil
Temporary
Nature
Forgive
Inquisitions
May
Final
Inquisition

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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The wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn't break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.
Walter Lippmann
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No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the 20th century. Our ancestors know their way from birth through eternity we are puzzled about the day after tomorrow.
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Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.
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I generalized rashly: That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon, then why act like a graven image? You are drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away.
Walter Lippmann
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The smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not be many idols left to smash.
Walter Lippmann
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Politicians tend to live in character and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.
Walter Lippmann
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In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief
Walter Lippmann
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Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
Walter Lippmann
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Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event.
Walter Lippmann
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The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
Walter Lippmann
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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
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When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.
Walter Lippmann
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Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
Walter Lippmann
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Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
Walter Lippmann
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We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.
Walter Lippmann
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The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
Walter Lippmann