Walter Lippmann Quotes & Sayings

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

There is economy in this. For the attempt to see all things freshly and in detail, rather than as types and generalities, is exhausting, and among busy affairs practically out of the question. In — Walter Lippmann

Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy. — Walter Lippmann

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

Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures. — Walter Lippmann

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

"When all think alike, then no one is thinking. — Walter Lippmann

A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function. — Walter Lippmann

To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state. — Walter Lippmann

There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil. — Walter Lippmann

Because the results are expressed in numbers, it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that the intelligence test is a measure like a foot ruler or a pair of scales. It is, of course, a quite different sort of measure. Intelligence is not an abstraction like length and weight; it is an exceedingly complicated notion - which nobody has yet succeeded in defining. — Walter Lippmann

Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals. — Walter Lippmann

We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy's side of the front is always propaganda and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace. — Walter Lippmann

A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless. — Walter Lippmann

So far as I am concerned I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it. — Walter Lippmann

To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love. — Walter Lippmann

In truly effective thinking the prime necessity is to liquidate judgments, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious and open-hearted. — Walter Lippmann

We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn't a human relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn't move in a strange direction. We don't know how to behave when personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. There are no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that wasn't made for a simpler age. We have changed our environment faster than we can change ourselves. — Walter Lippmann

In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority. — Walter Lippmann

Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking. — 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

It is all very well to talk about being the captain of your soul. It is hard, and only a few heroes, saints, and geniuses have been the captains of their souls for any extended period of their lives. — Walter Lippmann

Almost no two experiences are exactly alike, not even of two children in the same household. The older son never does have the experience of being the younger. And therefore, until we are able to discount the difference in nurture, we must withhold judgment about differences of nature. As well as judge the productivity of two soils by comparing their yield before you know which is in Labrador and which in Iowa, whether they have been cultivated and enriched, exhausted, or allowed to run wild. — Walter Lippmann

It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. — Walter Lippmann

In a democracy, the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is indispensable. — Walter Lippmann

An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department. — Walter Lippmann

The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure. — 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

The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority. — Walter Lippmann

While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important. — Walter Lippmann

Since position and contact play so big a part in determining what can be seen, heard, read, and experienced, as well as what it is permissible to see, hear, read, and know, it is no wonder that moral judgment is so much more common than constructive thought. — Walter Lippmann

We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilisations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern. — Walter Lippmann

Free institutions are not the property of any majority. They do not confer upon majorities unlimited powers. The rights of the majority are limited rights. They are limited not only by the constitutional guarantees but by the moral principle implied in those guarantees. That principle is that men may not use the facilities of liberty to impair them. No man may invoke a right in order to destroy it. — 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

There is an ascendant feeling among the people that all achievement should be measured in human happiness. — Walter Lippmann

Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the intelligible consequence of it. — 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

The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged. — Walter Lippmann

Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles. — Walter Lippmann

Thus the essence of freedom of opinion is not in mere toleration as such, but in the debate which toleration provides: it is not in the venting of opinion, but in the confrontation of opinion. — Walter Lippmann

We can best understand the furies of war and politics by remembering that almost the whole of each party believes absolutely in its picture of the opposition, that it takes as fact, not what is, but what it supposes to be the fact. — 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 about conservatism. — Walter Lippmann

It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it. — 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

It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage. — Walter Lippmann

In some measure, stimuli from the outside, especially when they are printed or spoken words, evoke some part of a system of stereotypes, so that the actual sensation and the preconception occupy consciousness at the same time. The two are blended, much as if we looked at red through blue glasses and saw green. — Walter Lippmann

We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists. — Walter Lippmann

If we ask ourselves what is this wisdom which experience forces upon us, the answer must be that we discover the world is not constituted as we had supposed it to be. It is not that we learn more about its physical elements, or its geography, or the variety of its inhabitants, or the ways in which human society is governed. Knowledge of this sort can be taught to a child without in any way disturbing his childishness. In fact, all of us are aware that we once knew a great many things which we have since forgotten. The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts; it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things. — Walter Lippmann

A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so. — 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

By putting the dead Germans in the focus of the picture, and by omitting to mention the French dead, a very special view of the battle was built up. It was a view designed to neutralize the effects of German territorial advances and the impression of power which the persistence of the offensive was making. It — Walter Lippmann

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

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

Political science has still to account for such facts as two nations attacking one another, each convinced that is is acting in self-defense, or two classes at war each certain that it speaks for the common interest. They live, we are likely to say, in different worlds. More accurately, they live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones. — Walter Lippmann

Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city. — Walter Lippmann

Each of us lives and works on a small part of the earth's surface, moves in a small circle, and of these acquaintances knows only a few intimately. — Walter Lippmann

The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases. — 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

The decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as the mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as something more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes and chemical reactions. For, unless man is something more than that, he has no rights that anyone is bound to respect, and there are no limitations upon his conduct which he is bound to obey. — Walter Lippmann

They are an ordered, more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We — Walter Lippmann

The prophecy of a world moving toward political unity is the light which guides all that is best, most vigorous, most truly alive in the work of our time. — Walter Lippmann

But if our philosophy tells us that each man is only a small part of the world, that his intelligence catches at best only phases and aspects in a coarse net of ideas, then, when we use our stereotypes, we tend to know that they are only stereotypes, to hold them lightly, to modify them gladly. We — 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

When a man and woman are successfully in love, their whole activity is energized and victorious. They walk better, their digestion improves, they think more clearly, their secret worries drop away, the world is fresh and interesting, and they can do more than they dreamed that they could do. In love of this kind sexual intimacy is not the dead end of desire as it is in romantic or promiscuous love, but periodic affirmation of the inward delight of desire pervading an active life. — Walter Lippmann

The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters. — Walter Lippmann

A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment. — Walter Lippmann

To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery. — Walter Lippmann

A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty. — Walter Lippmann

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

There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems. — 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

In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable. For — Walter Lippmann

It is often very illuminating ... to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion? — Walter Lippmann

Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious. — Walter Lippmann

Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital, but whatever it is that all the warring sects believe, who claim to be the faithful. From the gospels you cannot deduce the history of Christianity, nor from the Constitution the political history of America. It is Das Kapital as conceived, the gospels as preached and the preachment as understood, the Constitution as interpreted and administered, to which you have to go. — Walter Lippmann

Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration. — Walter Lippmann

In a place where everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks very much. — Walter Lippmann

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

Decidedly we shall not be safe if we forget the things of the mind. Indeed, if we want to save our souls, the mind must lead a more athletic life than it has ever done before, and must more passionately than ever practice and rejoice in art. For only through art can we cultivate annoyance with inessentials, powerful and exasperated reactions against ugliness, a ravenous appetite for beauty; and these are the true guardians of the soul. — Walter Lippmann

Only the consciousness of a purpose that is mightier than any man and worthy of all men can fortify and inspirit and compose the souls of men. — Walter Lippmann

If you ignore what a man desires, and you deny the very source of his power. — Walter Lippmann

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies. — Walter Lippmann

It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most. — 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

The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons. — 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

Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their countrys sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under. — Walter Lippmann

Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government. — Walter Lippmann

Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives. — Walter Lippmann

For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Greshams law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate. — Walter Lippmann

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

There are portions of the sovereign people who spend most of their spare time and spare money on motoring and comparing motor cars, on bridge-whist and post-mortems, on moving pictures and potboilers, talking always to the same people with minute variations on the same old themes. They cannot really be said to suffer from censorship, or secrecy, the high cost or the difficulty of communication. They suffer from anemia, from lack of appetite and curiosity for the human scene. Theirs is no problem of access to the world outside. Worlds of interest are waiting for them to explore, and they do not enter. — Walter Lippmann

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

Theodore Roosevelt was a conservative who adopted progressive policies. — Walter Lippmann

He seemed to be buffeted from both sides, challenged by his dreams, which revolted at the compromises of reality, and assaulted by reality which denounced the emptiness of all dreams.
He seemed to spend himself in that struggle - the severest that a man can face; and he seemed to win by a constant renewal of effort in which he refused to sink either into placid acceptance of the world, or into self-contained satisfaction with his vision. — Walter Lippmann

The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority. — 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

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

At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply. — Walter Lippmann