Walter Lippmann - A Preface To Politics (1913)

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

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
You and I are forever at the mercy of the census-taker and the census-maker. That impertinent fellow who goes from house to house is one of the real masters of the statistical situation. The other is the man who organizes the results.

Walter Lippmann
A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.

Walter Lippmann
The statistical method is of use only to those who have found it out.

Walter Lippmann
There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.

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
Statistics then is no automatic device for measuring facts.

Walter Lippmann
Even the most refined statistics are nothing but abstractions.

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
It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.

Walter Lippmann
It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men.

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

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

Walter Lippmann
There comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

Walter Lippmann
Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.

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