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The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.
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
Events
Bring
Hidden
Facts
Event
Reality
Relation
Light
Picture
Truth
Function
Make
Men
News
More quotes by Walter Lippmann
Politicians tend to live in character and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.
Walter Lippmann
Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.
Walter Lippmann
To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love.
Walter Lippmann
Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied.
Walter Lippmann
The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
Walter Lippmann
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
The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
Walter Lippmann
It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.
Walter Lippmann
It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.
Walter Lippmann
In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
Walter Lippmann
The prophecy of a world moving toward political unity is the light which guides all that is best, most vigorous, most truly alive in the work of our time.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Walter Lippmann
The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.
Walter Lippmann
The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
Walter Lippmann
At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.
Walter Lippmann
Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their countrys sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.
Walter Lippmann
The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.
Walter Lippmann
No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
Walter Lippmann
The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.
Walter Lippmann
I generalized rashly: That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon, then why act like a graven image? You are drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away.
Walter Lippmann
