Quotes from Walter Lippmann

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.

Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.

A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done.

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

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.

Only the consciousness of a purpose that is mightier than any man and worthy of all men can fortify and inspirit and compose the souls of men.

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

Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.

Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.

To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.

Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.

When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

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

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

For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.

We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.

Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.

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.

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

When all think alike, then no one is thinking.

Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.

If we cannot fully understand the acts of other people, until we know what they think they know, then in order to do justice we have to appraise not only the information which has been at their disposal, but the minds though which they have filtered it.