Walter Lippmann Quotes - Page 3

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.

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

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

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

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

A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done.

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

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

Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.

What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.

Liberty without discipline cannot survive. Without order and authority in the spirit of man the free way of life leads through weakness, disorganization, self-indulgence, and moral indifference to the destruction of freedom itself. The tragic ordeal through which the Western world is passing was prepared in the long period of easy liberty during which men forgot the elementary truths of human existence. They forgot that their freedom was achieved by heroic sacrifice.

Only the very rarest of princes can endure even a little criticism, and few of them can put up with even a pause in the adulation.

A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.

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

When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.

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

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

It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men.

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

When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.

People who are tremendously concerned about their identification, their individuality, their self-expression, or their sense of humor, always seem to be missing the very things they pursue.

The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but the roof.

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

Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate.

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