Quote

The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.

Walter Lippmann

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Walter Lippmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 23
Died: 1974
Died: December 14
Journalist
Politician
Writer
New York City
New York
Saloons
Sky
Speech
Least
True
Earth
Idiomatic
Men
Bleachers
Saloon

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

Image
Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.
Walter Lippmann
Image
When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration.
Walter Lippmann
Image
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
Walter Lippmann
Image
While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.
Walter Lippmann
Image
It is often very illuminating...to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?
Walter Lippmann
Image
Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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
Image
It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves.
Walter Lippmann
Image
The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.
Walter Lippmann
Image
When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
You don't have to preach honesty to men with creative purpose. Let a human being throw the engines of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.
Walter Lippmann
Image
To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
Walter Lippmann