317 Quotes by Walter Lippmann

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.

The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.

It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.

A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.

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.

Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.

There is but one bond of peace that is both permanent and enriching: The increasing knowledge of the world in which experiment occurs.

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.