Walter Lippmann

"A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function." Walter Lippmann

"Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed." Walter Lippmann

"It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it." Walter Lippmann

"Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking." Walter Lippmann

"The world is a better place to live in because it contains human beings who will give up ease and security in order to do what they themselves think worth doing. They do the useless, brave, noble, divinely foolish, and the very wisest things that are done by Man. And what they prove to themselves and to others is that Man is no mere creature of his habits, no automaton in his routine, but that in the dust of which he is made there is also fire, lighted now and then by great winds from the sky." Walter Lippmann

"And the principle which distinguishes democracy from all other forms of government is that in a democracy the opposition not only is tolerated as constitutional but must be maintained because it is in fact indispensable." Walter Lippmann

"Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures." Walter Lippmann

"The American's conviction that he must be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell is the very essence of the free man's way of life." Walter Lippmann

"Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse; clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind." Walter Lippmann

"The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics." Walter Lippmann

"The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the na?ve self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest. Statesmanship consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want." Walter Lippmann

"The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good." Walter Lippmann

"Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party." Walter Lippmann

"The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples." Walter Lippmann