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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.

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
Serve
Ought
Seems
Reason
Done
Make
Always
Topsy
Like
Irrational

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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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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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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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In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief
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Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.
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The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority.
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Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.
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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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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.
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The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
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A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.
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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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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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We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.
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There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.
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Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.
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A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.
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The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.
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The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
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There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation.
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