Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Walter Lippmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 23
Died: 1974
Died: December 14
Journalist
Politician
Writer
New York City
New York
Law
Transcending
Interest
Governed
Society
Recognizing
Common
Superior
Order
Superiors
Cannot
Rational
Without
Interests
Large
Plural
More quotes by Walter Lippmann
The invisible government [bosses] is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution. What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and are compelled to submit to it.
Walter Lippmann
Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
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
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.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
Walter Lippmann
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
There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
Walter Lippmann
In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are.
Walter Lippmann
Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
Walter Lippmann
There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.
Walter Lippmann
The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
Walter Lippmann
When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.
Walter Lippmann
Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: 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.
Walter Lippmann
The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.
Walter Lippmann
We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost. We must now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated.
Walter Lippmann
True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.
Walter Lippmann
