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
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.
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.