317 Quotes by Walter Lippmann

Chief Factors Limiting Access to Facts:1)Artificial censorship2)Limitations of social contact3)Comparatively meager time in a day for paying attention to public affairs.4)Distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages5)Difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world6)Fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of men's lives

We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.

Political science has still to account for such facts as two nations attacking one another, each convinced that is is acting in self-defense, or two classes at war each certain that it speaks for the common interest. They live, we are likely to say, in different worlds. More accurately, they live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones.

...the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and out of these three elements, a counterfeit of reality to which there was a violent instinctive response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.

The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.

Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.

Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.

Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied.