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The people who really matter in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule, or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat.
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
Stop
Goat
Wish
Goats
Social
Affairs
Matter
Leap
Really
Affair
Like
Neither
Crag
People
Mountain
Mule
Short
Mules
More quotes by Walter Lippmann
A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.
Walter Lippmann
Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
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The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.
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The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.
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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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The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.
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Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
Walter Lippmann
There comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing.
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We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world - introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably - that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves.
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Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.
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The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.
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A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting.
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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
Successful ... politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.
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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
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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
Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind.
Walter Lippmann
Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate.
Walter Lippmann
You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
Walter Lippmann
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