American writer, reporter & political commentator (1889-1974)
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.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Essays in the Public Philosophy
Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Morals
Our interest in sex is no longer to annihilate it, but to educate it, to find civilized opportunities for its expression.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
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.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truths from its errors.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
Thought is not made in a vacuum, nor created out of likeness. It requires travel and shipping and the coming and going of strangers to impregnate a civilization. That is why thought has flourished in cities which lie along the paths of communication. Nineveh, Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Venice, the Hansa towns, London, Paris -- they have made ideas out of the movement and contact of many people. Men are jostled into thought. Left alone they spin the same thread from the same dream. A community which is self-contained and homogeneous and secluded is intellectually deaf, dumb, and blind. It can cultivate robust virtue and simple dogmatism, but it will not invent or throw out a profusion of ideas.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Stakes of Diplomacy
Where there is no danger of overt action there is rarely any interference with freedom. That is why there has so often been amazing freedom of opinion within an aristocratic class which at the same time sanctioned the ruthless suppression of heterodox opinion among the common people. When the Inquisition was operating most effectively against the bourgeois who had lapsed into heresy, the princes of the Church and the nobles enjoyed the freedom of the Renaissance.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Men of Destiny
When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Morals
It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
The wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn't break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Morals
Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.
WALTER LIPPMANN
"Taking a Chance", Force and Ideas: The Early Writings