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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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Walter Lippmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 23
Died: 1974
Died: December 14
Journalist
Politician
Writer
New York City
New York
Nation
Cherish
Leader
Hopes
Belief
Beliefs
Nations
Permanent
Faith
Individuals
Individual
Leaders
Aggregation
Makes
Ideals
Cherishes
Mere
Custodians

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There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.
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Run against the grain of a nation's genius and see where you get with your laws.
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Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
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You don't have to preach honesty to men with creative purpose. Let a human being throw the engines of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty.
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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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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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It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves.
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Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.
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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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In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents.
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The news and the truth are not the same thing.
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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.
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You don't have to preach honesty to men with a creative purpose. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate this product. The reason isn't because duty says he shouldn't, but because passion says he couldn't.
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A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.
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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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Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, find reasons afterward.
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There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation.
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Only the very rarest of princes can endure even a little criticism, and few of them can put up with even a pause in the adulation.
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We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.
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The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
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