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

Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ... are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends. — Walter Lippmann

That is why it is often such a relief when the talk turns from "general topics" to a man's own hobby. It is like turning from the landscape in the parlor to the ploughed field outdoors. It is a return to the three dimensional world, after a sojourn in the painter's portrayal of his own emotional response to his own inattentive memory of what he imagines he ought to have seen. — 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

The deepest of all the stereotypes is the human stereotype which imputes human nature to inanimate or collective things. — 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

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

Even though a part of Lippmann was tempted to retreat from the world, to build "walls against chaos," he fought that temptation. He challenged himself, grappled with his demons, and deliberately pursued a career that forced him into the political thick of battle, did not allow him to withdraw from a fight, and exposed him every day to his enemies. That took a special kind of courage for a man who shunned personal contention. — Ronald Steel

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

When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking. — Walter Lippmann

I got quite good results from protein plates. — Gabriel 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

His supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show where the dangers are. — Walter Lippmann

Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse; clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind. — Walter Lippmann

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

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

We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change. — Walter Lippmann

It is easier to develop great power than it is to know how to use it wisely. — 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

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

Mr. Fulbright hasn't said anything new or interesting or clever in five years; his intellectual well dried up the day after Walter Lippmann stopped writing his regular column. — Spiro T. Agnew

A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law. — Walter Lippmann

The problem of direct colour photography has been facing us since the turn of the last century. — Gabriel Lippmann

What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors. — Walter Lippmann

A really good diplomat does not go in for victories, even when he wins them. — Walter Lippmann

What the public does is not to express its opinions but to align itself for or against a proposal. If that theory is accepted, we must abandon the notion that democratic government can be the direct expression of the will of the people. 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. We must say that the popular will does not direct continuously but that it intervenes occasionally. — 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

Where there is no danger of overt action there is rarely any interference with freedom. That is why there has so often been amazing freedom of opinion within an aristocratic class which at the same time sanctioned the ruthless suppression of heterodox opinion among the common people. When the Inquisition was operating most effectively against the bourgeois who had lapsed into heresy, the princes of the Church and the nobles enjoyed the freedom of the Renaissance. — 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 private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake. He knows he is somehow affected by what is going on. Rules and regulations continually, taxes annually and wars occasionally remind him that he is being swept along by great drifts of circumstance. Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers. — Walter Lippmann

Though it is disguised by the illusion that a bureaucracy accountable to a majority of voters, and susceptible to the pressure of organized minorities, is not exercising compulsion, it is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power as against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government. — Walter Lippmann

We have learned to call this propaganda. A group of men, who can prevent independent access to the event, arrange the news of it to suit their purpose. That the purpose was in this case patriotic does not affect the argument at all. They used their power to make the Allied publics see affairs as they desired them to be seen. The — 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

For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day. — Walter Lippmann

In the end, advertising rests upon the fact that consumers are a fickle and superstitious mob, incapable of any real judgment as to what it wants or how it is to get what it thinks it likes. — 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

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

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 balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics. — 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

Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible. — Walter Lippmann

The predominant teachings of this age are that there are no limits to man's capacity to govern others and that, therefore, no limitations ought to be imposed upon government. The older faith, born of long ages of suffering under man's dominion over man, was that the exercise of unlimited power by men with limited minds and self-regarding prejudices is soon oppressive, reactionary, and corrupt. The older faith taught that the very condition of progress was the limitation of power to the capacity and the virtue of rulers. — 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

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

tocsin of an ideological crusade, has no limits," Lippmann warned. — David McCullough

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

When Mr. Lippmann says that the founders of our free institutions were adherents of the philosophy of natural law, and that 'the free political institutions of the Western world were conceived and established' by men who held certain abstract beliefs, he speaks with the shortened perspective of an American way of thinking in which a manner of conducting affairs is inconceivable without an architect and without a premeditated 'dedication to a proposition.' But the fact is that nobody ever 'founded these institutions.' They are the product of innumerable human choices, over long stretches of time, but not of any human design. — Michael Oakeshott

For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. 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

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

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. — 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

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

In early July, Morgan Stanley received its first wake-up call. It came from Greg Lippmann and his bosses at Deutsche Bank, who, in a conference call, told Howie Hubler and his bosses that the $4 billion in credit default swaps Hubler had sold Deutsche Bank's CDO desk six months earlier had moved in Deutsche Bank's favor. Could Morgan Stanley please wire $1.2 billion to Deutsche Bank by the end of the day? Or, as Lippmann actually put it - according to someone who heard the exchange - Dude, you owe us one point two billion. — Michael Lewis

The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about. — Walter Lippmann

Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat. — Walter Lippmann

The mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation. — Walter Lippmann

Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are. — 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

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

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

According to a group of New England college students, writing in the year 1920, an alien was the following:
"A person hostile to his country."
"A person against the government."
"A person who is on the opposite side."
"A native of an unfriendly country."
"A foreigner at war."
"A foreigner who tries to do harm to the country he is in."
"An enemy from a foreign land."
"A person against a country." etc ...
Yet the word alien is an unusually exact legal term, far more exact than words like sovereignty, independence, national honor, rights, defense, aggression, imperialism, capitalism, socialism, about which we readily take sides "for" or "against. — 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

Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening. — Walter Lippmann

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

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

When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions. — Walter Lippmann

What matters is the character of ... stereotypes, and the gullibility with which we employ them. And these in the end depend upon ... our philosophy of life. If in that philosophy we assume that the world is codified according to a code which we possess, we are likely to make our reports of what is going on describe a world run by our code. 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 tend, also, to realize more and more clearly when our ideas started, where they started, how they came to us, why we accepted them. All useful history is antiseptic in this fashion. It enables us to know what fairy tale, what school book, what tradition, what novel, play, picture, phrase, planted one preconception in this mind, another in that mind. — Walter Lippmann

Life is short and progress is slow. — Gabriel Lippmann

Leaders are the custodians of a nation's ideals, of the beliefs it cherishes, of its permanent hopes, of the faith which makes a nation out of a mere aggregation of individuals. — Walter Lippmann

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much. - WALTER LIPPMANN — Robert B. Cialdini

There is but one bond of peace that is both permanent and enriching: The increasing knowledge of the world in which experiment occurs. — Walter Lippmann

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on. — Walter Lippmann

Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. — 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

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary. — Walter Lippmann

Successful ... 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. — Walter Lippmann

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

Walter Lippmann was once asked his views on a particular topic, he is said to have replied, I don't know what I think on that one. I haven't written about it yet. — Fareed Zakaria

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

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

When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists. — 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

The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the na?ve self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest. Statesmanship consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want. — Walter Lippmann

The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business. — 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

The news and the truth are not the same thing. — 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

Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity. — Walter Lippmann

Under the system of centralized control without constitutional checks and balances, the war spirit identifies dissent with treason, the pursuit of private happiness with slackerism and sabotage, and, on the other side, obedience with discipline, conformity with patriotism. Thus at one stroke war extinguishes the difficulties of planning, cutting out from under the individual any moral ground as well as any lawful ground on which he might resist the execution of the official plan. (Lippmann 1936: 67) — Anonymous