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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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Walter Lippmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 23
Died: 1974
Died: December 14
Journalist
Politician
Writer
New York City
New York
Name
Shall
Names
Rights
Deny
Later
Demand
Principles

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.
Walter Lippmann
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Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
Walter Lippmann
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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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Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.
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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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No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
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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Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, find reasons afterward.
Walter Lippmann
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You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
Walter Lippmann
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There comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing.
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 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
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A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
Walter Lippmann
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It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.
Walter Lippmann
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The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.
Walter Lippmann
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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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Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.
Walter Lippmann
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Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied.
Walter Lippmann