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
The American's conviction that he must be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell is the very essence of the free man's way of life.
We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.
We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.
Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.
The consent of the governed" is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.
We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost. We must now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated.
A really good diplomat does not go in for victories, even when he wins them.
The news and the truth are not the same thing.
Without order or authority in the spirit of man the free way of life leads through weakness, disorganization, self-indulgence, and moral indifference to the destruction of freedom itself. The tragic ordeal through which the Western world is passing was prepared in the long period of easy liberty, during which men . . . forgot that their freedom was achieved by heroic sacrifice. . . . They forgot that their rights were founded on their duties. . . . They thought it clever to be cynical, enlightened to be unbelieving, and sensible to be soft.
Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.
Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.
To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love.
The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.