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The host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples.

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
Thinker
Great
Host
Work
Average
Men
Usually
Transmitters
Genius
Automatic
Perhaps
Disciples
Stand
Hates
Hate
Disciple

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Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
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One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.
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There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
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The size of a man's income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any known fact of the world.
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Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.
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There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.
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The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
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It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it.
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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.
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The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
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A man cannot be a good doctor and keep telephoning his broker between patients nor a good lawyer with his eye on the ticker.
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We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
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It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.
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It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
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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.
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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.
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If somebody can create an absolute system of beliefs and rules of conduct that will guide a business man at eleven o'clock in the morning, a boy trying to select a career, a woman in an unhappy love affair--well then, surely no pragmatist will object. He insists only that philosophy shall come down to earth and be tried out there.
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Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
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Even God has been defended with nonsense.
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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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