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The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.

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
News
Conditions
Social
Report
Reports
Mirror
Mirrors
Aspect

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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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
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The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
Walter Lippmann
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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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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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We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
Walter Lippmann
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It is easier to develop great power than it is to know how to use it wisely.
Walter Lippmann
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Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.
Walter Lippmann
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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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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
Walter Lippmann
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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
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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
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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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For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.
Walter Lippmann
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What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...
Walter Lippmann
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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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The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
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.
Walter Lippmann
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We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world - introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably - that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves.
Walter Lippmann