Walter Lippmann's Quotes

No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.

Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

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.

People that are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.

Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main ballpark.

The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.

The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.

The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.

The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.

We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.

When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.

When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.

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.

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.

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.

The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.

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.

There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.

We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost. We must now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated.

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.

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

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.

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.