Walter Lippmann

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

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

The news and the truth are not the same thing.

There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.

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.

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.

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

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.

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?

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.

While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.

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.

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

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.

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.

The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.

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.

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.

No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the 20th century. Our ancestors know their way from birth through eternity; we are puzzled about the day after tomorrow.

Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.

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