Quote: Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character. [Walter Lippmann]
Quote: Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign. [Walter Lippmann]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power [Walter Lippmann]
Quote: 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]
Quote: Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience. [Walter Lippmann]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract. [Walter Lippmann]
Quote: Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism. [Walter Lippmann]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them. [Walter Lippmann]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists. [Walter Lippmann]
Quote: The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples. [Walter Lippmann]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority. [Walter Lippmann]
Quote: 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]