Walter Lippmann Quotes

"It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf."

"When all men think alike, no one thinks very much."

"No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people."

"Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon."

"There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems."

"Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail."

"The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully."

"The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth."

"Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible."

"The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart."

"We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists."

"Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much."

"Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak."

"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."

"The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race."

"In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs."

"Industry is a better horse to ride than genius."

"The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on."

"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."

"We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost. We must now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated."

"Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party."

"Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives."

"The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters."

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

"He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so."

"A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so."

"Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed."

"Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience."

"The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract."

"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."