Walter Lippmann Quotes

American journalist and political commentator (1889–1974)

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Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 – December 14, 1974) was a United States writer, journalist, and political commentator. With a career spanning 60 years he was among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological meaning, as well as critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books, most notably his 1922 book Public Opinion. Lippmann had a role in Woodrow Wilson's post-World War I board of inquiry, as its research director. His views regarding the role of journalism in a democracy were contrasted with the contemporaneous writings of John Dewey in what has been retrospectively named the Lippmann-Dewey debate. Lippmann won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his syndicated newspaper column "Today and Tomorrow" and one for his 1961 interview of Nikita Khrushchev.

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A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ...Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting.

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

Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.

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

[W]hether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.

Ideals are imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.

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

Democracy is more than the absence of czars, more than freedom, more than equal opportunity. It is a way of life, a use of freedom, an embrace of opportunity. For republics do not come in when kings go out, the defeat of a propertied class is not followed by a cooperative commonwealth, the emancipation of woman is more than a struggle for rights. A servile community will have a master, if not a monarch, then a landlord or a boss, and no legal device will save it. A nation of uncritical drifters can change only the form of tyranny, for like Christian's sword, democracy is a weapon in the hands of those who have the courage and the skill to wield it; in all others it is a rusty piece of junk.

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

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

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

If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.

The man who says that the world is a machine has really advanced no further than to say that he is so well satisfied with the analogy that he is through with searching any further.

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

[T]he modern man who has ceased to believe, without ceasing to be credulous, hangs, as it were, between heaven and earth, and is at rest nowhere.