Walter Lippmann Quotes

184 quotes in 2409 categories

• A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.
• We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world - introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably - that the best…
• The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being - which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs…
• A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say,…
• When all think alike, then no one is thinking
• It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.
• Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.
• Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.
• There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
• The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.
• Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.
• Politicians tend to live "in character" and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.
• When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.
• Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.
• You don't have to preach honesty to men with creative purpose. Let a human being throw the engines of his soul into the making of…
• Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
• Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration.
• The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may…
• In a democracy, the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is indispensable.
• He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.

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