Walter Lippmann Quotes

The news and the truth are not the same thing.

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.

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

When all think alike, then no one is thinking

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?

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

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

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.

Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.

The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.

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.

Love endures when the lovers love many things together And not merely each other.

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.

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

Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.

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

A state is absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and disestablish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern state claims all of these powers, and, in the matter of theory, there is no real difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and Democrats.

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.

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

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

When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.

The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.