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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.

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
Great
Intelligent
Organic
Way
Society
Adequate
Thinking
Free
Necessity
People
Keep
Wanting
Reporting
Cannot
Presses
Reliable
Government
Press
Govern
Without
Privilege
Country
Criticism
Informed

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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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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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The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.
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It is all very well to talk about being the captain of your soul. It is hard, and only a few heroes, saints, and geniuses have been the captains of their souls for any extended period of their lives.
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Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.
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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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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.
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People who are tremendously concerned about their identification, their individuality, their self-expression, or their sense of humor, always seem to be missing the very things they pursue.
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In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
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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.
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We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.
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A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.
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Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men.
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The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal but ideas are immortal.
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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.
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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.
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When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.
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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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He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
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Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.
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