Walter Lippmann - Men Quotes

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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
You don't have to preach honesty to men with a creative purpose. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate this product. The reason isn't because duty says he shouldn't, but because passion says he couldn't.

Walter Lippmann
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.

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
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 host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas; perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples.

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
Where love exists with self-respect and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that modern men are seeking to create.

Walter Lippmann
When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions.

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

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

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

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 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.

Walter Lippmann
The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.

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

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

Walter Lippmann
What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him.... The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.

Walter Lippmann
Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men.

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

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
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.

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

Walter Lippmann