Walter Lippmann Quotes

• The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Successful politicians…are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act. Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Newspapers necessarily and inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The study of error serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Error

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

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Politicians, Philosophers

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

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Humanism

• 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.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Distant, Complex

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

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Thinking

• 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.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Society

  Tags in Democratic

• 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.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Education

• We are all captives of the picture in our head – our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Belief

  Tags in Experienced

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

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Reformer

• 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.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Humanity

  Tags in Civil, Problem

• 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.

  Walter Lippmann

  Topics in Knowledge

Walter Lippmann (53)

Birth:	23rd September, 1989
Death:	14th December, 1974
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Critic, Journalist, Politician, Writer

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