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What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...

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
Certain
Pictures
Doe
Determine
Made
Based
Way
Direct
Men
Particular
World
Knowledge
Given
Moments

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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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.
Walter Lippmann
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The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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The news and the truth are not the same thing.
Walter Lippmann
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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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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.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann
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The consent of the governed is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.
Walter Lippmann
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Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.
Walter Lippmann
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The smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not be many idols left to smash.
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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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.
Walter Lippmann
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The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
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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The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.
Walter Lippmann
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It is often very illuminating...to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?
Walter Lippmann
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Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable.
Walter Lippmann
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The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.
Walter Lippmann
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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.
Walter Lippmann