Walter Lippmann

(294 votes)   An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.

Walter Lippmann
1889-1974, American Journalist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(272 votes)   Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power

Walter Lippmann
1889-1974, American Journalist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(137 votes)   Love endures only when the lovers love many things together and not merely each other.

Walter J. Lippmann

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(133 votes)   The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.

Walter Lippmann
1889-1974, American Journalist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(127 votes)   If all power is in the people, if there is no higher law than their will, and if by counting their votes, their will may be ascertained -- then the people may entrust all their power to anyone, and the power of the pretender and the usurper is then legitimate. It is not to be challenged since it came originally from the sovereign people.

Walter Lippmann
1889-1974, American Journalist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(111 votes)   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.

Walter Lippmann
1889-1974, American Journalist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(108 votes)   Let a human being throw the energies of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty.

Walter Lippmann
1889-1974, American Journalist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(107 votes)   The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but the roof.

Walter Lippmann
1889-1974, American Journalist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(106 votes)   The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.

Walter Lippmann
1889-1974, American Journalist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(98 votes)   Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.

Walter Lippmann
1889-1974, American Journalist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(98 votes)   The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force.

Walter Lippmann
1889-1974, American Journalist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(97 votes)   In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.

Walter Lippmann
1889-1974, American Journalist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(94 votes)   Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.

Walter Lippmann
1889-1974, American Journalist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(75 votes)   Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.

Walter Lippmann
1889-1974, American Journalist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

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

Walter Lippmann

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website