Walter Lippmann

"There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies." Walter Lippmann

"It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf." Walter Lippmann

"There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems." Walter Lippmann

"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

"What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority." Walter Lippmann

"Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible." Walter Lippmann

"The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract." Walter Lippmann

"The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth." Walter Lippmann

"No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people." Walter Lippmann

"The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters." Walter Lippmann

"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

"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

"Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience." Walter Lippmann

"The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class." Walter Lippmann