Top 200 Walter Lippmann Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When all think alike, then no one is thinking.”

— Walter Lippmann

2. “There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.”

— Walter Lippmann

3. “It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.”

— Walter Lippmann

4. “In a place where everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks very much.”

— Walter Lippmann

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

— Walter Lippmann

6. “The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.”

— Walter Lippmann

7. “The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.”

— Walter Lippmann

8. “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.”

— Walter Lippmann

9. “You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.”

— Walter Lippmann

10. “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

11. “Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.”

— Walter Lippmann

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

— Walter Lippmann

13. “The news and the truth are not the same thing.”

— Walter Lippmann

14. “But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?”

— Walter Lippmann

15. “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

16. “The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.”

— Walter Lippmann

17. “In a democracy, the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is indispensable.”

— Walter Lippmann

18. “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

19. “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

20. “The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.”

— Walter Lippmann

21. “There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.”

— Walter Lippmann

22. “Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.”

— Walter Lippmann

23. “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

24. “Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.”

— Walter Lippmann

25. “The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.”

— Walter Lippmann

26. “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

27. “When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions.”

— Walter Lippmann

28. “We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy’s side of the front is always propaganda and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace.”

— Walter Lippmann

29. “Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.”

— Walter Lippmann

30. “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

31. “Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern.”

— Walter Lippmann

32. “The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.”

— Walter Lippmann

33. “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

34. “We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.”

— Walter Lippmann

35. “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

36. “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

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

— Walter Lippmann

38. “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

39. “Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.”

— Walter Lippmann

40. “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

41. “A really good diplomat does not go in for victories, even when he wins them.”

— Walter Lippmann

42. “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

43. “The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.”

— Walter Lippmann

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

— Walter Lippmann

45. “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

46. “Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.”

— Walter Lippmann

47. “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

48. “Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable.”

— Walter Lippmann

49. “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

50. “True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known; if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.”

— Walter Lippmann