Walter Lippmann
The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.Collection: Democracy
Love endures when the lovers love many things together And not merely each other.Collection: Love
We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.Collection: Perception
Successful ... 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.Collection: Insecure
Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.Collection: Fall
Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.Collection: Democracy
There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.Collection: Law
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: War
The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.Collection: Angel
Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.Collection: Idols
When everyone thinks the same, nobody is thinking.Collection: Thinking
The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.Collection: Reality
Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.Collection: Selfish
The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.Collection: Want
In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.Collection: Party
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.Collection: Offering
The prophecy of a world moving toward political unity is the light which guides all that is best, most vigorous, most truly alive in the work of our time.Collection: Moving
We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.Collection: Affair
No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the 20th century. Our ancestors know their way from birth through eternity; we are puzzled about the day after tomorrow.Collection: Average
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Men
If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.Collection: War
A man cannot be a good doctor and keep telephoning his broker between patients nor a good lawyer with his eye on the ticker.Collection: Eye
In a place where everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks very much.Collection: Thinking
Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Done
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.Collection: Men
Run against the grain of a nation's genius and see where you get with your laws.Collection: Running
The modern world is reversing the old virtues of authority. They aimed deliberately to make men unworldly. They did not aim to found society on a full use of the earth's resources; they did not aim to use the whole nature of man; they did not intend him to think out the full expression of his desires. Democracy is a turning point upon those ideals in a pursuit, at first unconsciously, of the richest life that men can devise for themselves.Collection: Men
It is all very well to talk about being the captain of your soul. It is hard, and only a few heroes, saints, and geniuses have been the captains of their souls for any extended period of their lives.Collection: Hero
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.Collection: Missing
All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Mistake
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.Collection: Successful
The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.Collection: Men
A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.Collection: Humility
The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.Collection: Wise
Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event.Collection: Order
Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.Collection: Honesty
I do not despise genius-indeed, I wish I had a basketful of it. But yet, after a great deal of experience and observation, I have become convinced that industry is a better horse to ride than genius. It may never carry any man as far as genius has carried individuals, but industry-patient, steady, intelligent industry-will carry thousands into comfort, and even celebrity; and this it does with absolute certainty.Collection: Horse
Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.Collection: Records
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.Collection: Thinking
Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.Collection: Men
The consent of the governed" is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.Collection: Tyrants
I generalized rashly: That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretence 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, then why act like a graven image? You are drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away.Collection: Writing
Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.Collection: Past
What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...Collection: Men
The first principle of a civilized state is that power is legitimate only when it is under contract.Collection: Power