Walter Lippmann Quotes

• The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.

  Walter Lippmann

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• Successful politicians…are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.

  Walter Lippmann

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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 into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act. Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.

  Walter Lippmann

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• The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.

  Walter Lippmann

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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.

  Walter Lippmann

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• Newspapers necessarily and inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.

  Walter Lippmann

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• The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.

  Walter Lippmann

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• There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.

  Walter Lippmann

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• The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.

  Walter Lippmann

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• It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

  Walter Lippmann

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• The study of error serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.

  Walter Lippmann

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• A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Life

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• 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

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• 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

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• A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.

  Walter Lippmann

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• Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Age

• Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Belief

• Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.

  Walter Lippmann

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• Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.

  Walter Lippmann

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  Tags in Men, Orthodox

• Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

  Walter Lippmann

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  Tags in Biographies, Human Beings

Walter Lippmann (53)

Birth:	23rd September, 1989
Death:	14th December, 1974
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Critic, Journalist, Politician, Writer

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