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

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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.
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When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.
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Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.
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The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes.
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What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
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Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
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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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There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
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You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
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In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.
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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?
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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 democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.
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The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.
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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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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.
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Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.
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The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.
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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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A man cannot be a good doctor and keep telephoning his broker between patients nor a good lawyer with his eye on the ticker.
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