Walter Lippmann

It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.

— Walter Lippmann

Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.

— Walter Lippmann

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

— Walter Lippmann

Looking back we can see how indirectly we know the environment in which nevertheless we live. We can see that the news of it comes to us now fast, now slowly; but that whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself.

— Walter Lippmann

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

— Walter Lippmann

…the totalitarian states, whether of the fascist or the communist persuasion, are more than superficially alike as dictatorships, in the suppression of dissent, and in operating planned and directed economies. They are profoundly alike.

— Walter Lippmann

If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.

— Walter Lippmann

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.

— Walter Lippmann

The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.

— Walter Lippmann

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.

— Walter Lippmann

The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.

— Walter Lippmann

The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being--which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs--where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.

— Walter Lippmann

A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.

— Walter Lippmann

Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main ballpark.

— Walter Lippmann

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.

— Walter Lippmann

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

— Walter Lippmann

The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.

— Walter Lippmann

In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents.

— Walter Lippmann

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

— Walter Lippmann

Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.

— Walter Lippmann