Quote

The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.

Walter Lippmann

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Walter Lippmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 23
Died: 1974
Died: December 14
Journalist
Politician
Writer
New York City
New York
Balancing
Central
Ethics
Wants
Present
Future
Problem
Really

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

Image
All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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
Image
The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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
Image
Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate.
Walter Lippmann
Image
There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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
Image
Lovers who have nothing to do but love each other are not really to be envied love and nothing else very soon is nothing else.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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
Image
We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilisations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Men can know more than their ancestors did if they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors had already learned....That is why a society can be progressive only if it conserves its traditions.
Walter Lippmann
Image
Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.
Walter Lippmann
Image
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.
Walter Lippmann