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.
Source: Wikipedia (via CC-BY-SA license) • READ: Works by Walter Lippmann
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.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Media
The uprooting of human beings from the land, the concentration in cities, the breakdown of the authority of the family, of tradition, and of moral conventions, the complexity and the novelty of modern life, and finally the economic insecurity of our industrial system have called into being the modern social worker. They perform a function in modern society which is not a luxury but an absolute necessity.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Society
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
Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Ideals, Ideal
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.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Society
The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on. 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
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 a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
—Walter Lippmann
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
Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Character
Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers glory—to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Conservatives
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
Ignore what a man desires, and you ignore the very source of his power.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Desire, Desires
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
What a shame to waste those great shots on the practice tee
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Golf
When all think alike, no one is thinking very much.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Thinking
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
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
Topics: Government
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
Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Voting, Elections
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
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
Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Belief
When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Humanity
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
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
I am not an economist. I am an honest man!
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Honesty
The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Politics
Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Tolerance
The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.
—Walter Lippmann
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.”
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Democracy
There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Morality, Morals
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
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
Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, find reasons afterward.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Genius
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 great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: America, Wilderness
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
No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Education
If school success were a reliable index of human capacity, we should be able to go a step further and say that the intelligence test is a general measure of human capacity. But of course no such claim can be made for school success, for that would be to say that the purpose of the schools is to measure capacity. It is impossible to admit this. The child’s success with school work cannot be a measure of a child’s success in life. On the contrary, his success in life must be a significant measure of the school’s success in developing the capacities of the child. If a child fails in school and then fails in life, the school cannot sit back and say: you see how accurately I predicted this. Unless we are to admit that education is essentially impotent, we have to throw back the child’s failure at the school, and describe it as a failure not by the child but by the school.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Education
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Norman Cousins American Journalist
Carl Bernstein American Journalist
H. L. Mencken American Journalist, Literary Critic
James Fallows American Journalist
Charles Kuralt American Journalist
B. C. Forbes Scottish-born American Journalist
Dorothy Thompson American Journalist
Shana Alexander American Journalist
Lincoln Steffens American Journalist
Midge Decter American Journalist