American writer, reporter & political commentator (1889-1974)
Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
It is no wonder then, that the upholders of authority recognize in the labor movement and the women's awakening their mortal foes, or that Ibsen in that classic prophecy of his, should have seen in these same movements the two greatest forces for human emancipation. They are the power through which there will be accomplished that transvaluation of values which democracy means. They are pointed toward a frank worldliness, a cooperation among free people, they are pointed away from submissive want, balked impulse, and unquestioned obedience.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
Advertising, in fact, is the effort of business men to take charge of consumption as well as production. They are not content to supply a demand, as the text-books say; they educate the demand as well. In the end, advertising rests upon the fact that consumers are a fickle and superstitious mob, incapable of any real judgment as to what it wants or how it is to get what it thinks it would like. A bewildered child in a toy shop is nothing to the ultimate consumer in the world market of today. To say, then, that advertising is merely a way of calling attention to useful goods is a gorgeous piece of idealization. Advertising is in fact the weed that has grown up because the art of consumption is uncultivated.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery
The modern world is reversing the old virtues of authority. They aimed deliberately to make men unworldly. They did not aim to found society on a full use of the earth's resources; they did not aim to use the whole nature of man; they did not intend him to think out the full expression of his desires. Democracy is a turning point upon those ideals in a pursuit, at first unconsciously, of the richest life that men can devise for themselves.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Liberty and the News
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
Drift and Mastery
A more conscious life is one in which a man is conscious not only of what he sees, but of the prejudices with which he sees it.
WALTER LIPPMANN
"Sinclair Lewis", Public Persons
The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.
WALTER LIPPMANN
attributed, Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2006
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
Drift and Mastery
It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Force and Ideas: The Early Writings
Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Method of Freedom
With exceptions so rare they are regarded as miracles of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular--not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Essays in the Public Philosophy
The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Essential Lippmann
The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society. They are an ordered more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world, people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We are members.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
If somebody can create an absolute system of beliefs and rules of conduct that will guide a business man at eleven o'clock in the morning, a boy trying to select a career, a woman in an unhappy love affair--well then, surely no pragmatist will object. He insists only that philosophy shall come down to earth and be tried out there.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
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
It is often very illuminating ... to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics