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" The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract. "

Walter Lippmann

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

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" 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. "

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" People that are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives. "

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

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" A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state. "

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" Industry is a better horse to ride than genius. "

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" Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism. "

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" The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples. "

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs. "

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

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

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" The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race. "

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" There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems. "

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" 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. "

Walter Lippmann

" The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters. "

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" He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so. "

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

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" Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives. "

Walter Lippmann

" Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible. "

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" 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. "

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. "

Walter Lippmann

" In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents. "

Walter Lippmann

" Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience. "

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

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