Quotes from Walter Lippmann

Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the intelligible consequence of it.

He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.

Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.

Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak.

Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.

The first principle of a civilized state is that power is legitimate only when it is under contract.

The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.

When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.

This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement - that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it - that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.

What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.

We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost. We must now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated.

To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.

Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.

There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation.

The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.

A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.

What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.

The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.

A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.

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

The wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn't break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity.