American writer, reporter & political commentator (1889-1974)
With exceptions so rare they are regarded as miracles of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular--not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Essays in the Public Philosophy
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
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
Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Method of Freedom
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
All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
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
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
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
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 nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
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
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
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
When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Morals
All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Phantom Public
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
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
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
What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truths from its errors.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
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