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There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.

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
Humans
Regal
Self
Selves
Distinct
Private
Least
Public
Two
Human

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Where love exists with self-respect and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that modern men are seeking to create.
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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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The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.
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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.
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It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men.
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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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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.
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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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The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.
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While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.
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When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.
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No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the 20th century. Our ancestors know their way from birth through eternity we are puzzled about the day after tomorrow.
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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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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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Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.
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Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration.
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We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.
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When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
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The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
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But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?
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