Walter Lippmann Quotations

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

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.

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.

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.

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 final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

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

Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.

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

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

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.

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

Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.

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.

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

Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.

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

Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.

Industry is a better horse to ride than 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.

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

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.

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

It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.

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.

A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.

Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.

Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.

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.

The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.

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

The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.

Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.

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.

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.

He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.

When all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

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

Nobody has worked harder at inactivity with such a force of character, with such unremitting attention to detail, with such conscientious devotion to the task

I would have carved on the portals of the National Press Club, "Put not your trust in princes." 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.

It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an ax the desires of men

We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world -- introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably -- that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves.

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much

Love endures when the lovers love many things together And not merely each other.....

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. . .

The senator might remember that the Evangelists had a more inspiring subject.

Successful 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 unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.

The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority.

The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts; it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.

The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but the roof.

It is all very well to talk about being the captain of your soul. It is hard, and only a few heroes, saints, and geniuses have been the captains of their souls for any extended period of their lives.

Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, find reasons afterward.

The smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not be many idols left to smash.

At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.

Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.

The modern world is reversing the old virtues of authority. They aimed deliberately to make men unworldly. They did not aim to found society on a full use of the earth's resources; they did not aim to use the whole nature of man; they did not intend him to think out the full expression of his desires. Democracy is a turning point upon those ideals in a pursuit, at first unconsciously, of the richest life that men can devise for themselves.

It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it.

All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.

A regime, an established order, is rarely overthrown by a revolutionary movement; usually a regime collapses of its own weakness and corruption and then a revolutionary movement enters among the ruins and takes over the powers that have become vacant.

It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.

For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day.

Men can know more than their ancestors did if they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors had already learned....That is why a society can be progressive only if it conserves its traditions.

Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.

The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes.

Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.

Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.

Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are.

Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.

Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event.

Where there is no danger of overt action there is rarely any interference with freedom. That is why there has so often been amazing freedom of opinion within an aristocratic class which at the same time sanctioned the ruthless suppression of heterodox opinion among the common people. When the Inquisition was operating most effectively against the bourgeois who had lapsed into heresy, the princes of the Church and the nobles enjoyed the freedom of the Renaissance.

The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles; she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.

A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.

The life of a savage is beset by glowering terrors: from birth to death he lives in an animated world; where the sun and the stars, sticks, stones, and rivers are obsessed with his fate. He is busy all the time in a ritual designed to propitiate the abounding jealousies of nature. For his world is magical and capricious, the simplest thing is occult.

The American's conviction that he must be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell is the very essence of the free man's way of life.

We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.

Though it is disguised by the illusion that a bureaucracy accountable to a majority of voters, and susceptible to the pressure of organized minorities, is not exercising compulsion, it is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power as against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government.

But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?

The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.

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.

Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.

The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the na?ve self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest. Statesmanship consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want.

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.

The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.

The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.

Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate.

You don't have to preach honesty to men with creative purpose. Let a human being throw the engines of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty.

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.

Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.

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.

Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.

Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.

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.