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
In a democracy, the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is indispensable.
To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.
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.
The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.
Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.
Only the very rarest of princes can endure even a little criticism, and few of them can put up with even a pause in the adulation.
It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.
Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
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.
Politicians tend to live "in character" and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.
There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation.
The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.
A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.
The news and the truth are not the same thing.