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Walter Lippmann

39 quotes

“If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) first seen 1947 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In The Miami Herald (December 18, 1947), p. 6A.
“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 (1889–1974) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Asia and the West", New York Herald Tribune (European edition; September 15, 1965), p. 4
“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.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: International Press Institute Association, London (27 May 1965)
“You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[A]ll achievement should be measured in human happiness.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]here 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.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Democracy is a meaningless word unless it signifies that differences of opinion have been expressed, represented, and even satisfied in the decision.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What Modern Liberty Means", p. 47. Essay first published in The Atlantic (November 1919).
“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Looking back we can see how indirectly we know the environment in which nevertheless we live. We can see that the news of it comes to us now fast, now slowly; but that whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The facts we see depend on where we are placed, and the habits of our eyes.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[N]ews and truth are not the same thing and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act. Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he totalitarian states, whether of the fascist or the communist persuasion, are more than superficially alike as dictatorships, in the suppression of dissent, and in operating planned and directed economies. They are profoundly alike.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]here 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.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolate persons.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are no conventions, no tabus, no gods, no priests, princes, fathers, or revelations which they must accept. ... The prison door is wide open. They stagger out into trackless space under a blinding sun.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he modern man who has ceased to believe, without ceasing to be credulous, hangs, as it were, between heaven and earth, and is at rest nowhere.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The man who says that the world is a machine has really advanced no further than to say that he is so well satisfied with the analogy that he is through with searching any further.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ideals are imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]hether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[L]ove, in spite of the romantics, is not self-sustaining; it endures only when the lovers love many things together, and not merely each other.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ideal of the omni-competent, sovereign citizen is ... a false ideal. It is unattainable. The pursuit of it is misleading. The failure to achieve it has produced the current disenchantment. At the root of the effort to educate a people for self-government there has ... always been the assumption that the voter should aim to approximate as nearly as he can the knowledge and the point of view of the responsible man. He did not, of course, ever approximate it very nearly. But he was supposed to. It was believed that if only he could be taught more facts, if only he would take more interest, if only he would read more and better newspapers, if only he would listen to more lectures and read more reports, he would gradually be trained to direct public affairs. The whole assumption is false ... No progress can be made towards this unattainable ideal. This democratic conception is false because it fails to note the radical difference between the experience of the insider and the outsider ... No device of publicity, no machinery of enlightenment can endow [the outsider] during a crisis with the antecedent detailed and technical knowledge which is required for executive action. The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Phantom Public (1925) ch. 14
“Democracy is more than the absence of czars, more than freedom, more than equal opportunity. It is a way of life, a use of freedom, an embrace of opportunity. For republics do not come in when kings go out, the defeat of a propertied class is not followed by a cooperative commonwealth, the emancipation of woman is more than a struggle for rights. A servile community will have a master, if not a monarch, then a landlord or a boss, and no legal device will save it. A nation of uncritical drifters can change only the form of tyranny, for like Christian's sword, democracy is a weapon in the hands of those who have the courage and the skill to wield it; in all others it is a rusty piece of junk.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have come to see that Huxley was right when he said that “a man’s worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.” The evidences of these greater difficulties lie all about us: in the brave and brilliant atheists who have defied the Methodist God, and have become very nervous; in the women who have emancipated themselves from the tyranny of fathers, husbands, and homes, and with the intermittent but expensive help of a psychoanalyst, are now enduring liberty as interior decorators; in the young men and women who are world-weary at twenty-two; in the multitudes who drug themselves with pleasure; in the crowds enfranchised by the blood of heroes who cannot be persuaded to take an interest in their destiny; in the millions, at last free to think without fear of priest or policeman, who have made the moving pictures and the popular newspapers what they are.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It does not matter whether the right to govern is hereditary or obtained with the consent of the governed. 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 dis-establish 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.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With exceptions so rare they are regarded as miracles of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular—not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source