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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.

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

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.
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The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.
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It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves.
Walter Lippmann
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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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To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.
Walter Lippmann
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To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love.
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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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It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.
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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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Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.
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The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
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Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.
Walter Lippmann
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And the principle which distinguishes democracy from all other forms of government is that in a democracy the opposition not only is tolerated as constitutional but must be maintained because it is in fact indispensable.
Walter Lippmann
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It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it.
Walter Lippmann
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Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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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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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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In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief
Walter Lippmann