Quotes by Walter Lippmann

“The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.”

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

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

“His supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show where the dangers are.”

“The world is a better place to live in because it contains human beings who will give up ease and security and stake their own lives in order to do what they themselves think worth doing.”

“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.”

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

“It is doubtful whether a supreme master of style could pack all the elements of truth that complete justice would demand into a hundred word account of what had happened in Korea during the course ...”

“Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”

“A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn...”

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

“The sovereign people determines life and death and happiness under conditions where experience and experiment alike show thought to be most difficult."The intolerable burden of thought.”

“The modern skeptical world has been taught for some 200 years a conception of human nature in which the reality of evil, so well-known to the age of faith, has been discounted. Almost all of us gre...”

“If you ignore what a man desires, and you deny the very source of his power.”

“A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.”

“The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.”

“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...”

“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,...”

“It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.”

“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. ”