Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) was an American public intellectual, writer, reporter, and political commentator famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War, coining the term “stereotype” in the modern psychological meaning, and critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books, most notably his 1922 book Public Opinion. His views regarding the role of journalism in a democracy were contrasted with the contemporaneous writings of John Dewey in what has been retrospectively named the Lippmann-Dewey debate. Lippmann won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his syndicated newspaper column “Today and Tomorrow” and one for his 1961 interview of Nikita Khruschev.
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Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Culture
Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Honesty
If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.
—Walter Lippmann
Upon the standard to which the wise and honest will now repair it is written: You have lived the easy way; henceforth, you will live the hard way. You came into a great heritage made by the insight and the sweat and the blood of inspired and devoted and courageous men; thoughtlessly and in utmost self-indulgence you have all but squandered this inheritance. Now only by the heroic virtues which made this inheritance can you restore it again. You took the good things for granted. Now you must earn them again. For every right that you cherish, you have a duty which you must fulfill. For every hope that you entertain, you have a task that you must perform. For every good that you wish to preserve, you will have to sacrifice your comfort and your ease. There is nothing for nothing any longer.
—Walter Lippmann
Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.
—Walter Lippmann
Ignore what a man desires, and you ignore the very source of his power.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Desire, Desires
Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Opinion, Public opinion
People that are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Risk
Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: People
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.
—Walter Lippmann
The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Business
The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but the roof.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Justice
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.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Democracy
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
Topics: Mistakes
The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions. It is only when they work by a steady light of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation intelligible enough for a popular decision.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Media
In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Doing, Right, One Step at a Time, Think, Goals
The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Politicians, Politics
The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Politics
Only the consciousness of a purpose that is mightier than any man and worthy of all men can fortify and inspirit and compose the souls of men.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Purpose
Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing, they become fanatics about conservatism.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Success
What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
—Walter Lippmann
Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: The Past
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
No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Education
Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Belief
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: Journalism
When all think alike, then no one is thinking.
—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
I am not an economist. I am an honest man!
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Honesty
There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil – remain detached from the great
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Journalism
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