Walter Lippmann Quotes

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

~ Walter Lippmann

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

The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.

~ Walter Lippmann

His supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show where the dangers are.

~ Walter Lippmann

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

~ Walter Lippmann

The world is a better place to live in because it contains human beings who will give up ease and security and stake their own lives in order to do what they themselves think worth doing.

~ Walter Lippmann

Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.

~ Walter Lippmann

It is doubtful whether a supreme master of style could pack all the elements of truth that complete justice would demand into a hundred word account of what had happened in Korea during the course of several months. For language is by no means a perfect vehicle of meanings. Words, like currency, are turned over and over again, to evoke one set of images to-day, another to-morrow. There is no certainty whatever that the same word will call out exactly the same idea in the reader's mind as it did in the reporter's. Theoretically, if each fact and each relation had a name that was unique, and if everyone had agreed on the names, it would be possible to communicate without misunderstanding. In the exact sciences there is an approach to this ideal, and that is part of the reason why of all forms of world-wide cooperation, scientific inquiry is the most effective.

~ Walter Lippmann

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.

~ Walter Lippmann

The sovereign people determines life and death and happiness under conditions where experience and experiment alike show thought to be most difficult.The intolerable burden of thought.

~ Walter Lippmann

If you ignore what a man desires, and you deny the very source of his power.

~ Walter Lippmann

There are portions of the sovereign people who spend most of their spare time and spare money on motoring and comparing motor cars, on bridge-whist and post-mortems, on moving pictures and potboilers, talking always to the same people with minute variations on the same old themes. They cannot really be said to suffer from censorship, or secrecy, the high cost or the difficulty of communication. They suffer from anemia, from lack of appetite and curiosity for the human scene. Theirs is no problem of access to the world outside. Worlds of interest are waiting for them to explore, and they do not enter.

~ Walter Lippmann

...we can best understand the furies of war and politics by remembering that almost the whole of each party believes absolutely in its picture of the opposition, that it takes as fact, not what is, but what it supposes to be the fact.

~ Walter Lippmann

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

~ Walter Lippmann

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

~ Walter Lippmann

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

~ Walter Lippmann

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

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.

~ Walter Lippmann

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.

~ Walter Lippmann

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.

~ Walter Lippmann

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

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

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

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

~ Walter Lippmann

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

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

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