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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
Always
Topsy
Like
Irrational
Serve
Ought
Seems
Reason
Done
Make
More quotes by Walter Lippmann
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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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.
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Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.
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The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal but ideas are immortal.
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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.
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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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Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.
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Whatever truth you contribute to the world will be one lucky shot in a thousand misses. You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions.
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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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The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.
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In the end, advertising rests upon the fact that consumers are a fickle and superstitious mob, incapable of any real judgment as to what it wants or how it is to get what it thinks it likes.
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Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
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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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Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.
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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.
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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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Only the very rarest of princes can endure even a little criticism, and few of them can put up with even a pause in the adulation.
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A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done.
Walter Lippmann
The consent of the governed is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.
Walter Lippmann
There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.
Walter Lippmann
