Quotes from Walter Lippmann

There comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing.

Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.

Love endures when the lovers love many things together And not merely each other.

Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

The news and the truth are not the same thing.

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

Lovers who have nothing to do but love each other are not really to be envied; love and nothing else very soon is nothing else.

To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love.

We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.

What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.

Whatever truth you contribute to the world will be one lucky shot in a thousand misses. You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions.

There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.

In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents.

In a democracy, the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is indispensable.

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

The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.

Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main ballpark.

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

So far as I am concerned I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it.

The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.

There 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.

It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it.

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

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