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The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.

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
Presses
Tells
Press
Tell
Doe
Think
Thinking

More quotes by Walter Lippmann

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Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate.
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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.
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The people who really matter in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule, or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat.
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One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.
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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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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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Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
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Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
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Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.
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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.
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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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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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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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We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.
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Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.
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In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
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The host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples.
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The invisible government [bosses] is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution. What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and are compelled to submit to it.
Walter Lippmann
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The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.
Walter Lippmann
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While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.
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