Quote

Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine.

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
Time
Numbers
Cover
Opinion
Directly
Imagine
Opinions
Greater
Reach
Space
Bigger
Pieced
Others
Therefore
Reported
Together
Number
Inevitably
Things
Longer
Observe

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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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Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are.
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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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The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.
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In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief
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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 man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.
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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.
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The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.
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Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
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Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern.
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This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement - that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it - that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.
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The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.
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It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
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We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
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Men can know more than their ancestors did if they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors had already learned....That is why a society can be progressive only if it conserves its traditions.
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The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
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Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.
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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.
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Even God has been defended with nonsense.
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