WALTER LIPPMANN QUOTES IV

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


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


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


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

WALTER LIPPMANN

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

Tags: language


It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.

WALTER LIPPMANN

A Preface to Politics

Tags: reason


Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.

WALTER LIPPMANN

A Preface to Politics

Tags: deception


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

WALTER LIPPMANN

Public Opinion

Tags: mythology


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


All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.

WALTER LIPPMANN

The Phantom Public


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


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 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


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

WALTER LIPPMANN

A Preface to Politics

Tags: philosophy


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


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

WALTER LIPPMANN

A Preface to Morals


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

WALTER LIPPMANN

The Stakes of Diplomacy


The wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn't break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity.

WALTER LIPPMANN

Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest

Tags: future


Our interest in sex is no longer to annihilate it, but to educate it, to find civilized opportunities for its expression.

WALTER LIPPMANN

Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest

Tags: sex


Where there is no danger of overt action there is rarely any interference with freedom. That is why there has so often been amazing freedom of opinion within an aristocratic class which at the same time sanctioned the ruthless suppression of heterodox opinion among the common people. When the Inquisition was operating most effectively against the bourgeois who had lapsed into heresy, the princes of the Church and the nobles enjoyed the freedom of the Renaissance.

WALTER LIPPMANN

Men of Destiny

Tags: freedom