Top 200 Walter Lippmann Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes.”

— Walter Lippmann

52. “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

53. “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

54. “Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine.”

— Walter Lippmann

55. “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

56. “Run against the grain of a nation’s genius and see where you get with your laws.”

— Walter Lippmann

57. “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.”

— Walter Lippmann

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “There is but one bond of peace that is both permanent and enriching: The increasing knowledge of the world in which experiment occurs.”

— Walter Lippmann

62. “Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.”

— Walter Lippmann

63. “The mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation.”

— Walter Lippmann

64. “You and I are forever at the mercy of the census-taker and the census-maker. That impertinent fellow who goes from house to house is one of the real masters of the statistical situation. The other is the man who organizes the results.”

— Walter Lippmann

65. “He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.”

— Walter Lippmann

66. “Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.”

— Walter Lippmann

67. “For language is by no means a perfect vehicle of meanings. Words, like currency, are turned over and over again, to evoke one set of images to-day, another to-morrow. There is no certainty whatever that the same word will call out exactly the same idea in the reader’s mind as it did in the reporter’s.”

— Walter Lippmann

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

— Walter Lippmann

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

— Walter Lippmann

70. “Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.”

— Walter Lippmann

71. “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

72. “A man cannot be a good doctor and keep telephoning his broker between patients nor a good lawyer with his eye on the ticker.”

— Walter Lippmann

73. “Whatever truth you contribute to the world will be one lucky shot in a thousand misses. You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions.”

— Walter Lippmann

74. “Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.”

— Walter Lippmann

75. “The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.”

— Walter Lippmann

76. “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

77. “In the end, advertising rests upon the fact that consumers are a fickle and superstitious mob, incapable of any real judgment as to what it wants or how it is to get what it thinks it likes.”

— Walter Lippmann

78. “Only the consciousness of a purpose that is greater than any man can seed and fortify the souls of men.”

— Walter Lippmann

79. “The wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn’t break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity.”

— Walter Lippmann

80. “There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.”

— Walter Lippmann

81. “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

82. “Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.”

— Walter Lippmann

83. “Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.”

— Walter Lippmann

84. “Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.”

— Walter Lippmann

85. “The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.”

— Walter Lippmann

86. “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

87. “It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.”

— Walter Lippmann

88. “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

89. “To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love.”

— Walter Lippmann

90. “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

91. “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

92. “To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.”

— Walter Lippmann

93. “The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.”

— Walter Lippmann

94. “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

95. “The deepest of all the stereotypes is the human stereotype which imputes human nature to inanimate or collective things.”

— Walter Lippmann

96. “Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration.”

— Walter Lippmann

97. “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

98. “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

99. “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

100. “Each of us lives and works on a small part of the earth’s surface, moves in a small circle, and of these acquaintances knows only a few intimately.”

— Walter Lippmann