Quotes from Walter Lippmann

there are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.

All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.

Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.

Chief Factors Limiting Access to Facts: 1)Artificial censorship 2)Limitations of social contact 3)Comparatively meager time in a day for paying attention to public affairs. 4)Distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages 5)Difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world 6)Fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of men's lives

Since position and contact play so big a part in determining what can be seen, heard, read, and experienced, as well as what it is permissible to see, hear, read, and know, it is no wonder that moral judgment is so much more common than constructive thought.

These various remedies, eugenic, educational, ethical, populist and socialist, all assume that either the voters are inherently competent to direct the course of affairs or that they are making progress towards such an ideal. I think [democracy] is a false ideal.

But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?

the Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.

For language is by no means a perfect vehicle of meanings. Words, like currency, are turned over and over again, to evoke one set of images to-day, another to-morrow. There is no certainty whatever that the same word will call out exactly the same idea in the reader's mind as it did in the reporter's.

There is an ascendant feeling among the people that all achievement should be measured in human happiness.

The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.

Almost no two experiences are exactly alike, not even of two children in the same household. The older son never does have the experience of being the younger. And therefore, until we are able to discount the difference in nurture, we must withhold judgment about differences of nature. As well as judge the productivity of two soils by comparing their yield before you know which is in Labrador and which in Iowa, whether they have been cultivated and enriched, exhausted, or allowed to run wild.

Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.

The prophecy of a world moving toward political unity is the light which guides all that is best, most vigorous, most truly alive in the work of our time.

People that are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.

The host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas; perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples.

The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.

It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.

The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.

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

I would have carved on the portals of the National Press Club, Put not your trust in princes. Only the very rarest of princes can endure even a little criticism, and few of them can put up with even a pause in the adulation.

When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.

No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.

Leaders are the custodians of a nation's ideals, of the beliefs it cherishes, of its permanent hopes, of the faith which makes a nation out of a mere aggregation of individuals.