Walter Lippmann Quotes

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

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

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

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

The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.

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

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

[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.

Democracy is a meaningless word unless it signifies that differences of opinion have been expressed, represented, and even satisfied in the decision.

Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.

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

[T]here 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.

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.

[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.

In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.