American writer, reporter & political commentator (1889-1974)
The size of a man's income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any known fact of the world.
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
Though it is disguised by the illusion that a bureaucracy accountable to a majority of voters, and susceptible to the pressure of organized minorities, is not exercising compulsion, it is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power as against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Good Society
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 love exists with self-respect and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that modern men are seeking to create.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
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
All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Phantom Public
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
Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
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
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
All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
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
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
Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Morals
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
Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Stakes of Diplomacy