Walter Lippmann
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.Collection: Fall
Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: 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.Collection: Suicide
Liberty without discipline cannot survive. Without order and authority in the spirit of man the free way of life leads through weakness, disorganization, self-indulgence, and moral indifference to the destruction of freedom itself. The tragic ordeal through which the Western world is passing was prepared in the long period of easy liberty during which men forgot the elementary truths of human existence. They forgot that their freedom was achieved by heroic sacrifice.Collection: Life
To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.Collection: Fall
It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.Collection: Thinking
Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.Collection: Ideas
Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.Collection: Life
What the public does is not to express its opinions but to align itself for or against a proposal. If that theory is accepted, we must abandon the notion that democratic government can be the direct expression of the will of the people. We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilizations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern. We must say that the popular will does not direct continuously but that it intervenes occasionally.Collection: Government
Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Order
The American's conviction that he must be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell is the very essence of the free man's way of life.Collection: Eye
Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.Collection: Freedom
Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable.Collection: Real
The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.Collection: Men
You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.Collection: Flower
The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.Collection: Men
You don't have to preach honesty to men with a creative purpose. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate this product. The reason isn't because duty says he shouldn't, but because passion says he couldn't.Collection: Honesty
The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.Collection: Class
Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.Collection: Men
Politicians tend to live "in character" and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.Collection: Character
The news of the days it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.Collection: Book
The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the na?ve self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest. Statesmanship consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want.Collection: Art
It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves.Collection: Thinking
The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.Collection: Majority Rule
The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions. It is only when they work by a steady light of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation intelligible enough for a popular decision.Collection: Moving
This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement - that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it - that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Maps
Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Power
Though it is disguised by the illusion that a bureaucracy accountable to a majority of voters, and susceptible to the pressure of organized minorities, is not exercising compulsion, it is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power as against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government.Collection: Exercise
Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.Collection: Men
The smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not be many idols left to smash.Collection: Idols
Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, find reasons afterward.Collection: Purpose
Since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole.Collection: Looks
There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.Collection: Self
Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.Collection: Past
The world is a better place to live in because it contains human beings who will give up ease and security in order to do what they themselves think worth doing. They do the useless, brave, noble, divinely foolish, and the very wisest things that are done by Man. And what they prove to themselves and to others is that Man is no mere creature of his habits, no automaton in his routine, but that in the dust of which he is made there is also fire, lighted now and then by great winds from the sky.Collection: Giving Up
It has been the fashion to speak of the conflict between human rights and property rights, and from this it has come to be widely believed that the use of private property is tainted with evil and should not be espoused by rational and civilized men... the only dependable foundation of personal liberty is the personal economic security of private property. The Good Society.Collection: Wisdom
You don't have to preach honesty to men with creative purpose. Let a human being throw the engines of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty.Collection: Honesty
There is but one bond of peace that is both permanent and enriching: The increasing knowledge of the world in which experiment occurs.Collection: Peace
Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.Collection: Military
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.Collection: Average
The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake. He knows he is somehow affected by what is going on. Rules and regulations continually, taxes annually and wars occasionally remind him that he is being swept along by great drifts of circumstance. Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers.Collection: War
Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied.Collection: Sex
The size of a man's income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any known fact of the world.Collection: Book
The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles; she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.Collection: Uncles
Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.Collection: Men
Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.Collection: Fall
Newspapers necessarilyand inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.Collection: Organization