Inspirational Quotes by Walter Lippmann (American Journalist)

Let a human being throw the energies of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Talent

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: Prophecy

Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Virtue

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

For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Greshams law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.
—Walter Lippmann

The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Leadership, Genius

The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Wilderness, America

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

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: Politics, Politicians

The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Politics

I do not despise genius-indeed, I wish I had a basketful of it. But yet, after a great deal of experience and observation, I have become convinced that industry is a better horse to ride than genius. It may never carry any man as far as genius has carried individuals, but industry-patient, steady, intelligent industry-will carry thousands into comfort, and even celebrity; and this it does with absolute certainty.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Genius

Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Property

In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents. They are deprived of their independence. Democratic politicians rarely feel they can afford the luxury of telling the whole truth to the people. And since not telling it, though prudent, is uncomfortable, they find it easier if they themselves do not have to hear too often too much of the sour truth. The men under them who report and collect the news come to realize in their turn that it is safer to be wrong before it has become fashionable to be right.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Politics

I am not an economist. I am an honest man!
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Honesty

The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force.
—Walter Lippmann

A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Freedom

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Morals

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

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.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Democracy

The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the naive self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest. Statesmanship consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Politics

In really hard times the rules of the game are altered. The inchoate mass begins to stir. It becomes potent, and when it strikes, it strikes with incredible emphasis. Those are the rare occasions when a national will emerges from the scattered, specialized, or indifferent blocs of voters who ordinarily elect the politicians. Those are for good or evil the great occasions in a nation’s history.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Difficulties, Difficulty

He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconceivable, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
—Walter Lippmann

In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Doing, One Step at a Time, Goals, Think, Right

The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Dissent, Opposition

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

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

Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their countrys sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.
—Walter Lippmann

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 thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Ideas

When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Philosophers, Philosophy

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