Quotes By Walter Lippmann

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

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

Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.

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

A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.

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