Walter Lippmann Quotes About Opinions

Quotes about: Opinions

• It is often very illuminating...to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?

  Walter Lippmann

  Saws, Facts, Opinion

• Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.

  Walter Lippmann

  Democracy, Important, Public Opinion

• Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.

  Walter Lippmann

  Past, Opinion, Life Is

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

• The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.

  Walter Lippmann

  Class, Public Opinion, Elude

  Walter Lippmann (2012). “Public Opinion”, p.169, Courier Corporation

• What the public does is not to express its opinions but to align itself for or against a proposal. If that theory is accepted, we must abandon the notion that democratic government can be the direct expression of the will of the people. We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilizations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern. We must say that the popular will does not direct continuously but that it intervenes occasionally.

  Walter Lippmann

  Government, Expression, People

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

• 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

  Fall, Government, Order

  Walter Lippmann, Clinton Rossiter, James Lare (1982). “The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy”, p.241, Harvard University Press

• When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions.

  Walter Lippmann

  Children, Reality, Men

  Walter Lippmann, Clinton Rossiter, James Lare (1982). “The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy”, p.233, Harvard University Press

• The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.

  Walter Lippmann

  Public Opinion, Citizens, Comeback

  Walter Lippmann (2007). “Public Opinion”, p.368, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

• A state is absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and disestablish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern state claims all of these powers, and, in the matter of theory, there is no real difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and Democrats.

  Walter Lippmann

  Real, War, Differences

  Walter Lippmann (1960). “A Preface To Morals”, p.80, Transaction Publishers

• Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine.

  Walter Lippmann

  Numbers, Space, Together

  Walter Lippmann (2012). “Public Opinion”, p.43, Courier Corporation

• True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known; if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.

  Walter Lippmann

  Ideas, Justice, Littles

  Walter Lippmann (2012). “Liberty and the News”, p.42, Courier Corporation

• For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Greshams law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.

  Walter Lippmann

  Law, Liberty, Overcoming

  Walter Lippmann, Clinton Rossiter, James Lare (1982). “The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy”, p.196, Harvard University Press

• Where there is no danger of overt action there is rarely any interference with freedom. That is why there has so often been amazing freedom of opinion within an aristocratic class which at the same time sanctioned the ruthless suppression of heterodox opinion among the common people. When the Inquisition was operating most effectively against the bourgeois who had lapsed into heresy, the princes of the Church and the nobles enjoyed the freedom of the Renaissance.

  Walter Lippmann

  Class, People, Church

  Walter Lippmann (2003). “Men of Destiny (Ppr)”, p.99, Transaction Publishers

• Newspapers necessarilyand inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.

  Walter Lippmann

  Organization, Public Opinion, Newspapers

  1922 Public Opinion, ch.1.

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