Walter Lippmann Quotes

172 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Walter Lippmann
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.

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
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.

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

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

Walter Lippmann
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.

Walter Lippmann
It has been the fashion to speak of the conflict between human rights and property rights, and from this it has come to be widely believed that the use of private property is tainted with evil and should not be espoused by rational and civilized men... the only dependable foundation of personal liberty is the personal economic security of private property. The Good Society.

Walter Lippmann
The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.

Walter Lippmann
One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.

Walter Lippmann
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.

Walter Lippmann
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.

Walter Lippmann
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.

Walter Lippmann
All statistical devices are open to abuse and require constant correction.

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

Walter Lippmann
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.

Walter Lippmann
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.

Walter Lippmann
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.

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

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

Walter Lippmann
If somebody can create an absolute system of beliefs and rules of conduct that will guide a business man at eleven o'clock in the morning, a boy trying to select a career, a woman in an unhappy love affair--well then, surely no pragmatist will object. He insists only that philosophy shall come down to earth and be tried out there.

Walter Lippmann
Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.

Walter Lippmann