Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
Walter LippmannRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Voters often seek guidance on their desires, especially in times of uncertainty.
Walter Lippmann suggests that in times of confusion or trouble, voters do not just seek information about their immediate wants, but rather they desire leadership that can help them articulate those wants. He highlights the paradox in political communication where the need for clarity and direction often overshadows the data-driven analysis of public opinion.
Themes
VotersPoliticsLeadershipGuidanceDesiresCommunication
In practice
Example use cases
In a political speech when discussing the challenges faced by the electorate.
More from Walter Lippmann
All quotes →The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
Walter LippmannRead
The news and the truth are not the same thing.
Walter LippmannRead
There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
Walter LippmannRead
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 LippmannRead
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 LippmannRead
Similar quotes
Let's be clear: Voter suppression is real.
Stacey AbramsRead
The citizens of the United States have peculiar motives to support the energy of their constitutional charters.
James MadisonRead
We can't get to the $4 trillion in savings that we need by just cutting the 12 percent of the budget that pays for things like medical research and education funding and food inspectors and the weather service. And we can't just do it by making seniors pay more for Medicare.
Barack ObamaRead
Our democracy's history is littered with names we neither remember nor celebrate - people who stood in the way of progress while protecting the powerful. On Wednesday, a number of senators voted to join that list.
Gabrielle GiffordsRead
Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not the end itself.
Jawaharlal NehruRead
The silent majority really is a liberal majority, even though the word liberal has taken a real beating over the last 20 years by radical conservatives.
Robert ReichRead