Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological meaning, and critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books, most notably his 1922 book Public Opinion. Lippmann was also a notable author for the Council on Foreign Relations, until he had an affair with the editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong's wife, which led to a falling...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth23 September 1889
CountryUnited States of America
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.
Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
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.
The predominant teachings of this age are that there are no limits to man's capacity to govern others and that, therefore, no limitations ought to be imposed upon government. The older faith, born of long ages of suffering under man's dominion over man, was that the exercise of unlimited power by men with limited minds and self-regarding prejudices is soon oppressive, reactionary, and corrupt. The older faith taught that the very condition of progress was the limitation of power to the capacity and the virtue of rulers.
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.
The function of news is to signalize an event, the functionoftruth istobring to lightthehiddenfacts, toset them into relationwith each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.
Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.
There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.
The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.
For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.
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.
Newspapers necessarilyand inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.
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.