Walter Lippmann Quotes
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The news of the days it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.
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Only the very rarest of princes can endure even a little criticism, and few of them can put up with even a pause in the adulation.
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The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.
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The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
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No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the 20th century. Our ancestors know their way from birth through eternity; we are puzzled about the day after tomorrow.
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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.
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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.
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There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
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A man cannot be a good doctor and keep telephoning his broker between patients nor a good lawyer with his eye on the ticker.
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Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate.
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You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
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The size of a man's income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any known fact of the world.
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There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.
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When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.
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A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.
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A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting.
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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.
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The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.
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We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.
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A more conscious life is one in which a man is conscious not only of what he sees, but of the prejudices with which he sees it.
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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
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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.
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Since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole.
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A state is absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and disestablish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern state claims all of these powers, and, in the matter of theory, there is no real difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and Democrats.
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The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
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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.
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Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.
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A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.
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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.
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Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.
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