American writer, reporter & political commentator (1889-1974)
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.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Essential Lippmann
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.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
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
All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
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
The Public Philosophy
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
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
Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Phantom Public
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 people who really matter in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule, or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
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
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
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
Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
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
What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truths from its errors.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
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
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
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