Walter Lippmann quotes and sayings
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
Walter Lippmann quotes
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
- No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
- 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.
- Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main ballpark.
- 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.
- Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
- 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.