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
While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.
Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.
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.
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.
We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilisations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern.
The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.
Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
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 self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
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.
To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.