Walter Lippmann - Public Opinion (1922)

19 Sourced Quotes

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Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

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

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
Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.

Walter Lippmann
The function of news is to signalize an event, the functionoftruth istobring to lightthehiddenfacts, toset them into relationwith each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.

Walter Lippmann
There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.

Walter Lippmann
Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event.

Walter Lippmann
Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine.

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
Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.

Walter Lippmann
The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.

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 are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.

Walter Lippmann
The facts we see depend on where we are placed, and the habits of our eyes.

Walter Lippmann
We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.

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

Walter Lippmann
The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.

Walter Lippmann
In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.

Walter Lippmann