Walter Lippmann Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

[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.

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

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.

The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being--which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs--where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.

[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.

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

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

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

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