Walter Lippmann - A Preface To Politics (1913)

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Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.

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

Walter Lippmann
It is perfectly true that the government is best which governs least. It is equally true that the government is best which provides most.
A response to John L. O'Sullivan

Walter Lippmann
When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.

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

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
Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.

Walter Lippmann
Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.

Walter Lippmann
Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak.

Walter Lippmann
Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.

Walter Lippmann
Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

Walter Lippmann
Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.

Walter Lippmann
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.

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

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