Walter Lippmann Quotes About Virtue

Quotes about: Virtue

• The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.

  Walter Lippmann

  Men, Errors, Order

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

• The predominant teachings of this age are that there are no limits to man's capacity to govern others and that, therefore, no limitations ought to be imposed upon government. The older faith, born of long ages of suffering under man's dominion over man, was that the exercise of unlimited power by men with limited minds and self-regarding prejudices is soon oppressive, reactionary, and corrupt. The older faith taught that the very condition of progress was the limitation of power to the capacity and the virtue of rulers.

  Walter Lippmann

  Teaching, Exercise, Men

• 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.

  Walter Lippmann

  Success, Congratulations, Tired

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

• Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the intelligible consequence of it.

  Walter Lippmann

  Rewards, Virtue, Consequence

  Walter Lippmann (1960). “A Preface to Morals”, p.137, 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

• Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.

  Walter Lippmann

  Inspirational, Vices, Failing

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

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