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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
Thinks
Nobody
Everyone
Thinking

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The function of news is to signalize an event, the functionoftruth istobring to lightthehiddenfacts, toset them into relationwith each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.
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Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
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In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
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Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.
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Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.
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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.
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When all think alike, then no one is thinking
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Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
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Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.
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If all power is in the people, if there is no higher law than their will, and if by counting their votes, their will may be ascertained - then the people may entrust all their power to anyone, and the power of the pretender and the usurper is then legitimate. It is not to be challenged since it came originally from the sovereign people.
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A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting.
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To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
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Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
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All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
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The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.
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What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
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There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.
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The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
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It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it.
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The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
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