Walter Lippmann Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.”

“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.”

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

“The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.”

“We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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