Walter Lippmann
62 quotes
Biography
"It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf."
"There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride. They have yielded to the perennial temptation."
"Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible."
"Where all think alike, no one thinks very much."
"The ideal of the omni-competent, sovereign citizen is ... a false ideal. It is unattainable. The pursuit of it is misleading. The failure to achieve it has produced the current disenchantment. At the root of the effort to educate a people for self-government there has ... always been the assumption that the voter should aim to approximate as nearly as he can the knowledge and the point of view of the responsible man. He did not, of course, ever approximate it very nearly. But he was supposed to. It was believed that if only he could be taught more facts, if only he would take more interest, if only he would read more and better newspapers, if only he would listen to more lectures and read more reports, he would gradually be trained to direct public affairs. The whole assumption is false ... No progress can be made towards this unattainable ideal. This democratic conception is false because it fails to note the radical difference between the experience of the insider and the outsider ... No device of publicity, no machinery of enlightenment can endow [the outsider] during a crisis with the antecedent detailed and technical knowledge which is required for executive action. 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."
"If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe."
"The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence."
"A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ...Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting."
"You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers."
"[A]ll achievement should be measured in human happiness."
"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."
"Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others."
"Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character."
"[T]here 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."
"Democracy is more than the absence of czars, more than freedom, more than equal opportunity. It is a way of life, a use of freedom, an embrace of opportunity. For republics do not come in when kings go out, the defeat of a propertied class is not followed by a cooperative commonwealth, the emancipation of woman is more than a struggle for rights. A servile community will have a master, if not a monarch, then a landlord or a boss, and no legal device will save it. A nation of uncritical drifters can change only the form of tyranny, for like Christian's sword, democracy is a weapon in the hands of those who have the courage and the skill to wield it; in all others it is a rusty piece of junk."
"Democracy is a meaningless word unless it signifies that differences of opinion have been expressed, represented, and even satisfied in the decision."
"Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity."
"In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant."
"[T]he present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism."
"There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil."
"[T]he newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct."
"There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies."
"Looking back we can see how indirectly we know the environment in which nevertheless we live. We can see that the news of it comes to us now fast, now slowly; but that whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself."
"The facts we see depend on where we are placed, and the habits of our eyes."
"[N]ews and truth are not the same thing and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with 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."