Walter Lippmann Quotes

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

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

[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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

[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.

The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolate persons.

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

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