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When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.

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
Nobody
Everyone
Thinking
Thinks

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
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There is but one bond of peace that is both permanent and enriching: The increasing knowledge of the world in which experiment occurs.
Walter Lippmann
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The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.
Walter Lippmann
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Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.
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Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
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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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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
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Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
Walter Lippmann
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Leaders are the custodians of a nation's ideals, of the beliefs it cherishes, of its permanent hopes, of the faith which makes a nation out of a mere aggregation of individuals.
Walter Lippmann
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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
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Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.
Walter Lippmann
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In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
Walter Lippmann
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Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their countrys sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.
Walter Lippmann
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It is easier to develop great power than it is to know how to use it wisely.
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Successful ... politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.
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