Famous Walter Lippmann Quotations

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"The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on."
by Walter Lippmann
"When all men think alike, no one thinks very much."
by Walter Lippmann
"The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully."
by Walter Lippmann
"Because the results are expressed in numbers, it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that the intelligence test is a measure like a foot ruler or a pair of scales. It is, of course, a quite different sort of measure. Intelligence is not an abstraction like length and weight; it is an exceedingly complicated notion - which nobody has yet succeeded in defining."
by Walter Lippmann
"It requires wisdom to understand wisdom the music is nothing if the audience is deaf."
by Walter Lippmann
"Love endures only when the lovers love many things together and not merely each other."
by 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."
by Walter Lippmann
"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."
by 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."
by Walter Lippmann
"The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and will to carry on."
by Walter J. 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."
by Walter Lippmann
"Where all think alike, no one thinks very much."
by Walter Lippmann
"Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much."
by Walter Lippmann
"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."
by 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."
by Walter Lippmann
"The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract."
by Walter Lippmann
"Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization."
by Walter Lippmann
"Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power"
by Walter Lippmann
"In really hard times the rules of the game are altered. The inchoate mass begins to stir. It becomes potent, and when it strikes, it strikes with incredible emphasis. Those are the rare occasions when a national will emerges from the scattered, specialized, or indifferent blocs of voters who ordinarily elect the politicians. Those are for good or evil the great occasions in a nation's history."
by Walter Lippmann
"There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation."
by Walter Lippmann
"It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most."
by Walter Lippmann
"When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists."
by Walter Lippmann
"The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples."
by Walter Lippmann
"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."
by Walter Lippmann
"A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them."
by Walter Lippmann
"The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force."
by Walter Lippmann
"The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions. It is only when they work by a steady light of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation intelligible enough for a popular decision."
by Walter Lippmann
"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."
by Walter Lippmann
"There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral."
by 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."
by Walter Lippmann
"The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence."
by 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."
by Walter Lippmann
"Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main ballpark."
by Walter Lippmann
"In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs."
by Walter Lippmann


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