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 effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Voting
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
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
Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Virtue
I am not an economist. I am an honest man!
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Honesty
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
Ignore what a man desires, and you ignore the very source of his power.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Desire, Desires
If all power is in the people, if there is no higher law than their will, and if by counting their votes, their will may be ascertained—then the people may entrust all their power to anyone, and the power of the pretender and the usurper is then legitimate. It is not to be challenged since it came originally from the sovereign people.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: People
The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.
—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
Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Property
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
When all think alike, then no one is thinking.
—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
When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Humanity
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
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
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
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
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
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: Genius, Leadership
Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Belief
There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Evangelism
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
When all think alike, no one is thinking very much.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Thinking
The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Public opinion, Opinion
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
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Norman Cousins American Journalist
- Carl Bernstein American Journalist
- H. L. Mencken American Journalist, Literary Critic
- James Fallows American Author
- Charles Kuralt American Journalist
- B. C. Forbes Scottish-born American Journalist
- Dorothy Thompson American Journalist, Writer
- Shana Alexander American Journalist
- Lincoln Steffens American Journalist
- Midge Decter American Journalist
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