Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 - December 14, 1974) was an American
public intellectual, writer, reporter, and political commentator famous
for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War; he
coined the term stereotype in the modern psychological meaning as well.
Lippmann was twice awarded (1958 and 1962) a Pulitzer Prize for his
syndicated newspaper column, 'Today and Tomorrow'. (Click
here for full Wikipedia article)
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A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the
conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy
can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments
without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon
the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.
A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that,
transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a
superior common law.
Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The
moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what ca n be
taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.
Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made
imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average
conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his
forefathers' glory- to the archaic formula which happened to express
their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time
it was served.
An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak
links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and
it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and
sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and
hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in
the State Department.
Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of
idealizations and selections which we call our character.
Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to
expect solutions in a political compaign.
Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public
only through a fictitious personality.
He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is
inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
If all power is in the people, if there is no higher law than their
will, and if by counting their votes, their will may be ascertained-
then the people may entrust all their power to anyone, and the power of
the pretender and the usurper is then legitimate. It is not to be
challenged since it came originally from the sovereign people.
In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It
administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion
of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect
perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives,
always required to court their restless constituents.
In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather
than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should
have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should
never outrage the minority.
In really hard times the rules of the game are altered. The inchoate
mass begins to stir. It becomes potent, and when it strikes... it
strikes with incredible emphasis. Those are the rare occasions when a
national will emerges from the scattered, specialized, or indifferent
blocs of voters who ordinarily elect the politicians. Those are for good
or evil the great occasions in a nation's history.
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the
audience is deaf.
Let a human being throw the energies of his soul into the making of
something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty.
No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a
democracy out of an illiterate people.
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
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.
Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of
progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them
and it is weak.
Statesmanship... consists in giving the people not what they want but
what they will learn to want.
Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the
other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about
conservatism.
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.
The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to
change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares
the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also
against the people collectively.
The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their
failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist
is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The
problem of sanctions is secondary.
The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular
moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the
thing the voters most want is to be told what to want
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.
The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the
wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
The history of the notion of privacy would be an entertaining tale.
The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book
out of which a people determines its conduct.
The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not
experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event.
That is why until we know what others think they know, we cannot truly
understand their acts.
The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other
sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from
his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster
unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he
will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin
him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without
opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.
The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his
daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get
something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after
privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large
unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular
and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that
the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to
mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases.
The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a
searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then
another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world
by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents,
and eruptions. It is only when they work by a steady light of their own,
that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation
intelligible enough for a popular decision.
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.
The simple opposition between the people and big business has
disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved
in big business.
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.
There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a
divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have
yielded to the perennial temptation.
There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement- that it loves a
crowd and fears the individuals who compose it- that the religion of
humanity should have no faith in human beings.
Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own
destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who
come to it saying: 'I demand from you in the name of your principles the
rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.'
Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive
virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost. We must
now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need
to be educated.
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.
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.
When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized,
become humanists.
When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be
philosophers.
Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid
derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about
the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This
breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate
and catastrophic decline of Western society.
With exceptions so rare they are regarded as miracles of nature,
successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men.
Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the
word is impossible.
Categories:
Quotes of the day,
Walter Lippmann
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