Walter Lippmann Quotes

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

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

[T]he present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.

[T]he totalitarian states, whether of the fascist or the communist persuasion, are more than superficially alike as dictatorships, in the suppression of dissent, and in operating planned and directed economies. They are profoundly alike.

[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.

[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 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.

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

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

[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.

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

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.

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

[T]here is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.

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