Walter Lippmann Quotes

Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.

To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.

It is easier to develop great power than it is to know how to use it wisely.

People who are tremendously concerned about their identification, their individuality, their self-expression, or their sense of humor, always seem to be missing the very things they pursue.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.

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.

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

Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.

It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.

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

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.

Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.

In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.

Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse; clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind.

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.

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.

The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.

Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.

Lovers who have nothing to do but love each other are not really to be envied; love and nothing else very soon is nothing else.

The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.

The people who really matter in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule, or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat.

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.

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

Politicians tend to live "in character" and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.

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

A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.

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.

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

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.

In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief

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.

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.

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

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

It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.

The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.

A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.

The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.

The prophecy of a world moving toward political unity is the light which guides all that is best, most vigorous, most truly alive in the work of our time.

It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.

Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.

A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.

The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.