WALTER LIPPMANN QUOTES III

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

Where love exists with self-respect and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that modern men are seeking to create.

WALTER LIPPMANN

Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest

Tags: family


That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretense that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon.

WALTER LIPPMANN

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


It is often very illuminating ... to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?

WALTER LIPPMANN

Public Opinion

Tags: opinion


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 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


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


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


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


Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.

WALTER LIPPMANN

Drift and Mastery

Tags: liberty


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

WALTER LIPPMANN

A Preface to Politics

Tags: philosophy


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


Out of the opposition we make villains and conspiracies. If prices go up unmercifully the profiteers have conspired; if the newspapers misrepresent the news, there is a capitalist plot; if the rich are too rich, they have been stealing; if a closely fought election is lost, the electorate was corrupted; if a statesman does something of which you disapprove, he has been bought or influenced by some discreditable person. If workingmen are restless, they are the victims of agitators; if they are restless over wide areas, there is a conspiracy on foot. If you do not produce enough aeroplanes, it is the work of spies; if there is trouble in Ireland, it is German or Bolshevik "gold." And if you go stark, staring mad looking for plots, you see all strikes, the Plumb plan, Irish rebellion, Mohammedan unrest, the restoration of King Constantine, the League of Nations, Mexican disorder, the movement to reduce armaments, Sunday movies, short skirts, evasion of the liquor laws, Negro self-assertion, as sub-plots under some grandiose plot engineered either by Moscow, Rome, the Free Masons, the Japanese, or the Elders of Zion.

WALTER LIPPMANN

Public Opinion


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.

WALTER LIPPMANN

The Public Philosophy


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


The people who really matter in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule, or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat.

WALTER LIPPMANN

Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest


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


The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.

WALTER LIPPMANN

The Essential Lippmann


Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.

WALTER LIPPMANN

A Preface to Morals

Tags: authority


Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

WALTER LIPPMANN

Public Opinion

Tags: silence


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