Top 200 Walter Lippmann Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.”

— Walter Lippmann

105. “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

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

— Walter Lippmann

107. “One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud’s analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.”

— Walter Lippmann

108. “Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are.”

— Walter Lippmann

109. “A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.”

— Walter Lippmann

110. “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

111. “The world is a better place to live in because it contains human beings who will give up ease and security and stake their own lives in order to do what they themselves think worth doing.”

— Walter Lippmann

112. “Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.”

— Walter Lippmann

113. “They are an ordered, more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We.”

— Walter Lippmann

114. “Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.”

— Walter Lippmann

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

— Walter Lippmann

116. “Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.”

— Walter Lippmann

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.”

— Walter Lippmann

121. “All achievement should be measured in human happiness.”

— Walter Lippmann

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

— Walter Lippmann

123. “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

124. “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

125. “Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.”

— Walter Lippmann

126. “The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority.”

— Walter Lippmann

127. “What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.”

— Walter Lippmann

128. “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

129. “Industry is a far better horse to ride a genius.”

— Walter Lippmann

130. “The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles; she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.”

— Walter Lippmann

131. “Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.”

— Walter Lippmann

132. “Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.”

— Walter Lippmann

133. “Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.”

— Walter Lippmann

134. “The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.”

— Walter Lippmann

135. “Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.”

— Walter Lippmann

136. “In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief.”

— Walter Lippmann

137. “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

138. “Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.”

— Walter Lippmann

139. “The world is vast, the situations that concern us are intricate, the messages are few, the biggest part of opinion must be constructed in the imagination.”

— Walter Lippmann

140. “The size of a man’s income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any known fact of the world.”

— Walter Lippmann

141. “When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.”

— Walter Lippmann

142. “We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.”

— Walter Lippmann

143. “If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.”

— Walter Lippmann

144. “Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.”

— Walter Lippmann

145. “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

146. “It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.”

— Walter Lippmann

147. “Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.”

— Walter Lippmann

148. “Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.”

— Walter Lippmann

149. “The host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas; perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples.”

— Walter Lippmann

150. “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