Quote

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.

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
Whatever
Breath
Cannot
Breaths
Truth
Shot
Right
Shots
Precautions
World
Missing
Precaution
Lucky
Misses
Taking
Contribute
Thousand
Holding

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.
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What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
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Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.
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The mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation.
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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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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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It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
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The American's conviction that he must be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell is the very essence of the free man's way of life.
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A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment.
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Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.
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In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.
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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.
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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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At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.
Walter Lippmann
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The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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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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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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Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.
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The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.
Walter Lippmann