Walter Lippmann

[T]he newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.

The facts we see depend on where we are placed, and the habits of our eyes.

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.

It does not matter whether the right to govern is hereditary or obtained with the consent of the governed. 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 dis-establish 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.

[A]ll achievement should be measured in human happiness.

There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.

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

[L]ove, in spite of the romantics, is not self-sustaining; it endures only when the lovers love many things together, and not merely each other.

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

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers.

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.

[N]ews and truth are not the same thing and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act. Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.