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Run against the grain of a nation's genius and see where you get with your laws.

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
Running
Grain
Laws
Genius
Nation
Law
Nations

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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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.
Walter Lippmann
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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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Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.
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The consent of the governed is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.
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Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.
Walter Lippmann
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Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.
Walter Lippmann
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The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.
Walter Lippmann
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To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love.
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A more conscious life is one in which a man is conscious not only of what he sees, but of the prejudices with which he sees it.
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The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being - which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs - where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.
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You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
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The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.
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The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
Walter Lippmann
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We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.
Walter Lippmann
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The mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation.
Walter Lippmann
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The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.
Walter Lippmann
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He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann