Top 200 Walter Lippmann Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men.”

— Walter Lippmann

152. “It was in the recognition that there is in each man a final essence, that is to say an immortal soul which only God can judge, that a limit was set upon the dominion of men over men.”

— Walter Lippmann

153. “The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.”

— Walter Lippmann

154. “The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.”

— Walter Lippmann

155. “This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement – that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it – that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.”

— Walter Lippmann

156. “We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost. We must now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated.”

— Walter Lippmann

157. “Theodore Roosevelt was a conservative who adopted progressive policies.”

— Walter Lippmann

158. “There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.”

— Walter Lippmann

159. “The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.”

— Walter Lippmann

160. “All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.”

— Walter Lippmann

161. “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.”

— Walter Lippmann

162. “Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.”

— Walter Lippmann

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

— Walter Lippmann

164. “A more conscious life is one in which a man is conscious not only of what he sees, but of the prejudices with which he sees it.”

— Walter Lippmann

165. “The outsider is necessarily ignorant, usually irrelevant and often meddlesome, because he is trying to navigate the ship from dry land.”

— Walter Lippmann

166. “Politicians tend to live “in character” and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.”

— Walter Lippmann

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

— Walter Lippmann

168. “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. They mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the difference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar, and the somewhat strange as sharply alien. They.”

— Walter Lippmann

169. “Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.”

— Walter Lippmann

170. “What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.”

— Walter Lippmann

171. “Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.”

— Walter Lippmann

172. “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.”

— Walter Lippmann

173. “The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.”

— Walter Lippmann

174. “The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.”

— Walter Lippmann

175. “When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.”

— Walter Lippmann

176. “It is all very well to talk about being the captain of your soul. It is hard, and only a few heroes, saints, and geniuses have been the captains of their souls for any extended period of their lives.”

— Walter Lippmann

177. “It is easier to develop great power than it is to know how to use it wisely.”

— Walter Lippmann

178. “A regime, an established order, is rarely overthrown by a revolutionary movement; usually a regime collapses of its own weakness and corruption and then a revolutionary movement enters among the ruins and takes over the powers that have become vacant.”

— Walter Lippmann

179. “Newspapers necessarilyand inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.”

— Walter Lippmann

180. “All useful history is antiseptic in this fashion. It enables us to know what fairy tale, what school book, what tradition, what novel, play, picture, phrase, planted one preconception in this mind, another in that mind.”

— Walter Lippmann

181. “It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.”

— Walter Lippmann

182. “Lovers who have nothing to do but love each other are not really to be envied; love and nothing else very soon is nothing else.”

— Walter Lippmann

183. “So far as I am concerned I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it.”

— Walter Lippmann

184. “The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.”

— Walter Lippmann

185. “In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.”

— Walter Lippmann

186. “There comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing.”

— Walter Lippmann

187. “Only the consciousness of a purpose that is mightier than any man and worthy of all men can fortify and inspirit and compose the souls of men.”

— Walter Lippmann

188. “Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.”

— Walter Lippmann

189. “Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.”

— Walter Lippmann

190. “Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.”

— Walter Lippmann

191. “It is not the idea as such which the censor attacks, whether it be heresy or radicalism or obscenity. He attacks the circulation of the idea among the classes which in his judgment are not to be trusted with the idea.”

— Walter Lippmann

192. “Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.”

— Walter Lippmann

193. “The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.”

— Walter Lippmann

194. “Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the intelligible consequence of it.”

— Walter Lippmann

195. “You don’t have to preach honesty to men with a creative purpose. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate this product. The reason isn’t because duty says he shouldn’t, but because passion says he couldn’t.”

— Walter Lippmann

196. “It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.”

— Walter Lippmann

197. “It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.”

— Walter Lippmann

198. “Even God has been defended with nonsense.”

— Walter Lippmann

199. “Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse; clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind.”

— Walter Lippmann

200. “The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.”

— Walter Lippmann