Best 233 quotes of Walter Lippmann on MyQuotes

A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.

A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.

A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting.

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.

A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.

All achievement should be measured in human happiness.

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

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers glory - to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served.

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.

A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.

A man cannot be a good doctor and keep telephoning his broker between patients nor a good lawyer with his eye on the ticker.

A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.

A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.

An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.

And the principle which distinguishes democracy from all other forms of government is that in a democracy the opposition not only is tolerated as constitutional but must be maintained because it is in fact indispensable.

A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done.

A really good diplomat does not go in for victories, even when he wins them.

A regime, an established order, is rarely overthrown by a revolutionary movement; usually a regime collapses of its own weakness and corruption and then a revolutionary movement enters among the ruins and takes over the powers that have become vacant.

Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.

A state is absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and disestablish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern state claims all of these powers, and, in the matter of theory, there is no real difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and Democrats.

At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.

A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment.

Because the results are expressed in numbers, it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that the intelligence test is a measure like a foot ruler or a pair of scales. It is, of course, a quite different sort of measure. Intelligence is not an abstraction like length and weight; it is an exceedingly complicated notion - which nobody has yet succeeded in defining.

Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men.

Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse; clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind.

Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.

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

But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?

Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.

Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.

Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.

Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.

Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.

Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.

For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Greshams law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.

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.

For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day.

Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.

Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate.

Free institutions are not the property of any majority. They do not confer upon majorities unlimited powers. The rights of the majority are limited rights. They are limited not only by the constitutional guarantees but by the moral principle implied in those guarantees. That principle is that men may not use the facilities of liberty to impair them. No man may invoke a right in order to destroy it.

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

Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.

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

I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.

If all power is in the people, if there is no higher law than their will, and if by counting their votes, their will may be ascertained - then the people may entrust all their power to anyone, and the power of the pretender and the usurper is then legitimate. It is not to be challenged since it came originally from the sovereign people.

If somebody can create an absolute system of beliefs and rules of conduct that will guide a business man at eleven o'clock in the morning, a boy trying to select a career, a woman in an unhappy love affair--well then, surely no pragmatist will object. He insists only that philosophy shall come down to earth and be tried out there.