110+ Walter Lippmann Quotes On Society, Government And Public Opinion

Walter Lippmann was an American journalist, political commentator, and author. He was one of the most influential American public intellectuals of the 20th century, and his works helped shape modern American liberalism. He wrote extensively on foreign affairs, and his works such as Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925) are still widely read today. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Walter Lippmann on society, government, public opinion.

Top 10 Walter Lippmann Quotes

1. It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
2. The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
3. He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
4. When all think alike, then no one is thinking
5. The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.
6. 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?
7. All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
8. The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
9. There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.
10. The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.

Walter Lippmann Short Quotes

• Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
• When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.
• There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
• Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power
• Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
• There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.
• Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.
• A really good diplomat does not go in for victories, even when he wins them.
• It is easier to develop great power than it is to know how to use it wisely.
• To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.

Walter Lippmann Quotes About Society

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs. — 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

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

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society. — Walter Lippmann

The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being -- which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs -- where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error. — Walter Lippmann

A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law. — Walter Lippmann

Men can know more than their ancestors did if they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors had already learned....That is why a society can be progressive only if it conserves its traditions. — Walter Lippmann

The smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not be many idols left to smash. — Walter Lippmann

There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other. — Walter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann Quotes About Government

Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends. — Walter Lippmann

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. — 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

The consent of the governed" is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well. — Walter Lippmann

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. — Walter Lippmann

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. — Walter Lippmann

We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception. — Walter Lippmann

The invisible government [bosses] is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution. What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and are compelled to submit to it. — Walter Lippmann

Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. — Walter Lippmann

Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government. — Walter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann Quotes About Public Opinion

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

The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class. — Walter Lippmann

Newspapers necessarilyand inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion. — Walter Lippmann

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

Walter Lippmann Quotes About Love

Lovers who have nothing to do but love each other are not really to be envied; love and nothing else very soon is nothing else. — Walter Lippmann

Love endures when the lovers love many things together And not merely each other. — Walter Lippmann

Where love exists with self-respect and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that modern men are seeking to create. — Walter Lippmann

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. — Walter Lippmann

To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love. — Walter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann Quotes About People

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. — Walter Lippmann

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

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. — Walter Lippmann

People who are tremendously concerned about their identification, their individuality, their self-expression, or their sense of humor, always seem to be missing the very things they pursue. — 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

The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business. — 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

The people who really matter in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule, or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat. — Walter Lippmann

For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day. — Walter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann Quotes About Democracy

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. — Walter Lippmann

A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator. — Walter Lippmann

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

We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilisations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern. — Walter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann Quotes About Belief

We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists. — Walter Lippmann

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

Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon. — Walter Lippmann

In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief — Walter Lippmann

The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth. — Walter Lippmann

We are all captives of the picture in our head -- our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists. — Walter Lippmann

So far as I am concerned I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it. — Walter Lippmann

Leaders are the custodians of a nation's ideals, of the beliefs it cherishes, of its permanent hopes, of the faith which makes a nation out of a mere aggregation of individuals. — Walter Lippmann

A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty. — Walter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann Quotes About Life

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

A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment. — Walter Lippmann

The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts; it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things. — Walter Lippmann

A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless. — Walter Lippmann

A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state. — Walter Lippmann

The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure. — Walter Lippmann

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

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

To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state. — Walter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann Quotes About Sense

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

Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. — Walter Lippmann

Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their countrys sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under. — Walter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann Famous Quotes And Sayings

Successful ... 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. — Walter Lippmann

Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization. — 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

Only the very rarest of princes can endure even a little criticism, and few of them can put up with even a pause in the adulation. — Walter Lippmann

A regime, an established order, is rarely overthrown by a revolutionary movement; usually a regime collapses of its own weakness and corruption and then a revolutionary movement enters among the ruins and takes over the powers that have become vacant. — 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

Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men. — Walter Lippmann

A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done. — Walter Lippmann

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. — Walter Lippmann

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting. — Walter Lippmann

Only the consciousness of a purpose that is mightier than any man and worthy of all men can fortify and inspirit and compose the souls of men. — Walter Lippmann

Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre. — Walter Lippmann

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. — Walter Lippmann

We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world -- introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably -- that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves. — 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

When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists. — Walter Lippmann

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. — Walter Lippmann

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

Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign. — Walter Lippmann

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. — Walter Lippmann

Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings. — Walter Lippmann

When all men think alike, no one thinks very much. — Walter Lippmann

The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd. — Walter Lippmann

Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat. — Walter Lippmann

The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers. — Walter Lippmann

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. — Walter Lippmann

The function of news is to signalize an event, the functionoftruth istobring to lightthehiddenfacts, toset them into relationwith each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide. — Walter Lippmann

Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity. — Walter Lippmann

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers. — Walter Lippmann

You don't have to preach honesty to men with creative purpose. Let a human being throw the engines of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty. — 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

Politicians tend to live "in character" and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him. — Walter Lippmann

The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority. — Walter Lippmann

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. — Walter Lippmann

Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach. — Walter Lippmann

Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives. — Walter Lippmann

It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. — Walter Lippmann

The prophecy of a world moving toward political unity is the light which guides all that is best, most vigorous, most truly alive in the work of our time. — Walter Lippmann

It is not the idea as such which the censor attacks, whether it be heresy or radicalism or obscenity. He attacks the circulation of the idea among the classes which in his judgment are not to be trusted with the idea. — Walter Lippmann

It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do. — Walter Lippmann

Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main ballpark. — Walter Lippmann

The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons. — Walter Lippmann

Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail. — Walter Lippmann

Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable. — Walter Lippmann

Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious. — Walter Lippmann

When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers. — Walter Lippmann

If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe. — Walter Lippmann

Freedom to speak... can be maintained only by promoting debate. — Walter Lippmann

The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants. — 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

All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms. — Walter Lippmann

Life Lessons by Walter Lippmann

1. Walter Lippmann taught us to think critically and objectively about the world, to question the status quo, and to form our own opinions.
2. He also emphasized the importance of understanding the complexities of society and the power of knowledge.
3. He encouraged us to be open-minded, to challenge ourselves, and to strive for progress.