We are all captives of the picture in our head—our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Belief
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
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
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 decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as the mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as something more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes and chemical reactions. For, unless man is something more than that, he has no rights that anyone is bound to respect, and there are no limitations upon his conduct which he is bound to obey.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Humankind, Man, Mankind
Ignore what a man desires, and you ignore the very source of his power.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Desires, Desire
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 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
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
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 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
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
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
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
The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Prejudice
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
In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Right, Doing, Goals, One Step at a Time, Think
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
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Audiences, Wisdom
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
Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Ideals, Ideal
Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Virtue
The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.
—Walter Lippmann
Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, find reasons afterward.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Genius
The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master’s ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Advice
Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Character
I am not an economist. I am an honest man!
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Honesty
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
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
People that are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
—Walter Lippmann
Topics: Risk
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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