WALTER LIPPMANN QUOTES III

American writer, reporter & political commentator (1889-1974)

Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.

WALTER LIPPMANN

The Method of Freedom

Tags: property


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.

WALTER LIPPMANN

A Preface to Morals

Tags: morality


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

WALTER LIPPMANN

A Preface to Morals

Tags: birth control


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

WALTER LIPPMANN

A Preface to Politics

Tags: desire


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

Essays in the Public Philosophy

Tags: law


Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.

WALTER LIPPMANN

Public Opinion

Tags: honesty


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

A Preface to Politics


Whatever truth you contribute to the world will be one lucky shot in a thousand misses. You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions.

WALTER LIPPMANN

"Taking a Chance", Force and Ideas: The Early Writings

Tags: truth


Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. 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.

WALTER LIPPMANN

Public Opinion

Tags: propaganda


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

WALTER LIPPMANN

A Preface to Politics

Tags: philosophy


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

A Preface to Politics


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

Good Society

Tags: government


The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society. 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 are members.

WALTER LIPPMANN

Public Opinion


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

WALTER LIPPMANN

A Preface to Morals


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

A Preface to Politics

Tags: genius


Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character. We extend this into all our thinking. Between us and the realities of social life we build up a mass of generalizations, abstract ideas, ancient glories, and personal wishes. They simplify and soften experience. 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. We worry about their fate and forget their original content.

WALTER LIPPMANN

A Preface to Politics

Tags: character


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

WALTER LIPPMANN

Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest


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

Public Opinion

Tags: money


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

WALTER LIPPMANN

Public Opinion

Tags: mythology


Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.

WALTER LIPPMANN

Public Opinion

Tags: words