317 Quotes by Walter Lippmann

When a man and woman are successfully in love, their whole activity is energized and victorious. They walk better, their digestion improves, they think more clearly, their secret worries drop away, the world is fresh and interesting, and they can do more than they dreamed that they could do. In love of this kind sexual intimacy is not the dead end of desire as it is in romantic or promiscuous love, but periodic affirmation of the inward delight of desire pervading an active life.

What the public does is not to express its opinions but to align itself for or against a proposal. If that theory is accepted, we must abandon the notion that democratic government can be the direct expression of the will of the people. 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. We must say that the popular will does not direct continuously but that it intervenes occasionally.

Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.

Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration.

The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.

It is often very illuminating...to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?

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

No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.