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 present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism." Walter Lippmann

"Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion." Walter Lippmann

"A state is absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and disestablish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern state claims all of these powers, and, in the matter of theory, there is no real difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and Democrats." Walter Lippmann

"Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism." Walter Lippmann

"When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions." Walter Lippmann

"The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but the roof." Walter Lippmann

"For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture." Walter Lippmann