American writer, reporter & political commentator (1889-1974)
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
Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
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
Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Morals
Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Stakes of Diplomacy
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
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
Where there is no danger of overt action there is rarely any interference with freedom. That is why there has so often been amazing freedom of opinion within an aristocratic class which at the same time sanctioned the ruthless suppression of heterodox opinion among the common people. When the Inquisition was operating most effectively against the bourgeois who had lapsed into heresy, the princes of the Church and the nobles enjoyed the freedom of the Renaissance.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Men of Destiny
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
When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
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
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
All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Essential Lippmann
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
Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
The wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn't break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.
WALTER LIPPMANN
"Taking a Chance", Force and Ideas: The Early Writings