Walter Lippmann Quotes About Authority

Quotes about: Authority

• Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable.

  Walter Lippmann

  Real, Printed Word, Yesterday

  "Public Opinion". Book by Walter Lippmann, 1922.

• Liberty without discipline cannot survive. Without order and 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 the elementary truths of human existence. They forgot that their freedom was achieved by heroic sacrifice.

  Walter Lippmann

  Life, Clever, Sacrifice

  "The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy".

• Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.

  Walter Lippmann

  Freedom, Men, Effort

  Walter Lippmann (1960). “A Preface To Morals”, p.14, Transaction Publishers

• The modern world is reversing the old virtues of authority. They aimed deliberately to make men unworldly. They did not aim to found society on a full use of the earth's resources; they did not aim to use the whole nature of man; they did not intend him to think out the full expression of his desires. Democracy is a turning point upon those ideals in a pursuit, at first unconsciously, of the richest life that men can devise for themselves.

  Walter Lippmann

  Men, Thinking, Expression

• A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.

  Walter Lippmann

  Fall, Confusion, Democracy

  Walter Lippmann (1936). “Authority in the crisis”

• The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority.

  Walter Lippmann

  Moral, Guidance, Authority

  Walter Lippmann (1960). “A Preface To Morals”, p.14, Transaction Publishers

• Though it is disguised by the illusion that a bureaucracy accountable to a majority of voters, and susceptible to the pressure of organized minorities, is not exercising compulsion, it is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power as against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government.

  Walter Lippmann

  Exercise, Government, Minorities

• Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.

  Walter Lippmann

  Idols, Ideas, Fruit

  Walter Lippmann (1914). “A Preface to Politics”

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