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


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

WALTER LIPPMANN

A Preface to Politics

Tags: desire


All achievement should be measured in human happiness.

WALTER LIPPMANN

A Preface to Politics

Tags: happiness


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


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


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


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


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 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


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


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

WALTER LIPPMANN

A Preface to Morals


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


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 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


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

WALTER LIPPMANN

The Phantom Public


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

WALTER LIPPMANN

Public Opinion

Tags: mythology


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 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


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