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The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.

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
May
Rationally
Would
Acted
Men
Clearly
Saws
Choose
Public
Interest
Disinterestedly
Thought
Presumed

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Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.
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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.
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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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Love endures when the lovers love many things together And not merely each other.
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A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.
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Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.
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Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.
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Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.
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No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
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To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
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The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.
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The host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples.
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The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.
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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.
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The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.
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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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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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The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being - which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs - where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.
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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.
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The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.
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