Quote

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

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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
Truth
Devoted
Problem
Skill
People
Organized
Misleading
Skills
Poisoned
Source
Bewildered
Brain
Mislead
Strong
Deception
Become
Brains

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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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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Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.
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Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
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Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind.
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Even God has been defended with nonsense.
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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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In a place where everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks very much.
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The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.
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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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When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions.
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Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men.
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It is often very illuminating...to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?
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The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
Walter Lippmann
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Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.
Walter Lippmann
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Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
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When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
Walter Lippmann
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Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.
Walter Lippmann
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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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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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It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
Walter Lippmann