Walter Lippmann

We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.

Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

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.

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.

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.

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.

Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.

When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.

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.

Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.

When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.

Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak.

Only the consciousness of a purpose that is mightier than any man and worthy of all men can fortify and inspirit and compose the souls of men.

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.

Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.

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

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.

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

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

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