Walter Lippmann Quotes - Page 4

But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?

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.

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.

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.

A more conscious life is one in which a man is conscious not only of what he sees, but of the prejudices with which he sees it.

In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.

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.

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.

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

Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.

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

Since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole.

The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.

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

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.

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

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.

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.

Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.

We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.

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

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

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.

Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.