Walter Lippmann Quotes

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.
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.
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.
The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.
The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.
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.
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.
The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
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.
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 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.
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.
Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
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.
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.
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AuthorName
Walter Lippmann
Profession
Journalist
BirthDate
23 September, 1889
DeathDate
14 December, 1974
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