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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.

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
Order
Superiors
Cannot
Rational
Without
Interests
Large
Plural
Law
Transcending
Interest
Governed
Society
Recognizing
Common
Superior

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There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation.
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It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it.
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A regime, an established order, is rarely overthrown by a revolutionary movement usually a regime collapses of its own weakness and corruption and then a revolutionary movement enters among the ruins and takes over the powers that have become vacant.
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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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You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
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Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event.
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Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.
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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
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All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
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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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It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.
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There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.
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The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.
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Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
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I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.
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