WALTER LIPPMANN QUOTES
American writer, reporter & political commentator (1889-1974)
You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Ten Contemporary Thinkers
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Stakes of Diplomacy
It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake. He knows he is somehow affected by what is going on. Rules and regulations continually, taxes annually and wars occasionally remind him that he is being swept along by great drifts of circumstance. Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Phantom Public
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: The music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Morals
For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
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.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
When the private man has lived through the romantic age in politics and is no longer moved by the stale echoes of its hot cries, when he is sober and unimpressed, his own part in public affairs appears to him a pretentious thing, a second rate, an inconsequential. You cannot move him then with a good straight talk about service and civic duty, nor by waving a flag in his face, nor by sending a boy scout after him to make him vote. He is a man back home from a crusade to make the world something or other it did not become; he has been tantalized too often by the foam of events, has seen the gas go out of it.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Phantom Public
What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Men of Destiny
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.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Public Philosophy
Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Morals
It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Stakes of Diplomacy
Since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles; she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery
The life of a savage is beset by glowering terrors: from birth to death he lives in an animated world; where the sun and the stars, sticks, stones, and rivers are obsessed with his fate. He is busy all the time in a ritual designed to propitiate the abounding jealousies of nature. For his world is magical and capricious, the simplest thing is occult.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics