Walter Lippmann Quotes

172 Sourced Quotes

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

Walter Lippmann
Whatever truth you contribute to the world will be one lucky shot in a thousand misses. You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions.

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

Walter Lippmann
The size of a man's income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any known fact of the world.

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

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

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

Walter Lippmann
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.

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

Walter Lippmann
The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.

Walter Lippmann
Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.

Walter Lippmann
True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known; if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.

Walter Lippmann
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.

Walter Lippmann
Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the intelligible consequence of it.

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

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

Walter Lippmann
Run against the grain of a nation's genius and see where you get with your laws.

Walter Lippmann
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.

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
The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.

Walter Lippmann
The wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn't break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity.

Walter Lippmann