Quotes by Walter Lippmann

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

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

We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world - introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably - that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves.

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.

While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.

To understand is not only to pardon but in the end to love.

There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.

In the course of a debate with Lewis Terman: Without offering any data on all that occurs between conception and the age of kindergarten, they announce on the basis of what they have got out of a few thousand questionnaires that they are measuring the hereditary mental endowment of human beings. Obviously, this is not a conclusion obtained by research. It is a conclusion planted by the will to believe. It is, I think, for the most part unconsciously planted. . . . If the impression takes root that these tests really measure intelligence, that they constitute a sort of last judgment on the child's capacity, that they reveal "scientifically" his predestined ability, then it would be a thousand times better if all the intelligence testers and all their questionnaires were sunk in the Sargasso Sea.

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.

When all think alike, no one is thinking very much.