Great Throughts Treasury

A database of quotes

Walter Lippmann

American Intellectual, Reporter, Teacher, Editor, Journalist and Political Commentator

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




"Those who use their reason do not reach the same conclusions as those who obey their prejudices."


"We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change."



"A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless."

"Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others."

"For as long as a time as we can see into the future, we shall be living between war and peace, between a war that cannot be fought and a peace that cannot be achieved. The great issues which divide the world cannot be decided by a war that could be won, and they cannot be settled by a treaty that can be negotiated... the power which used to deal with the division and conflicts of the past, namely, organized war, has become an impossible instrument to use."

"Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power; run against the grain of a nation's genius and see where you get with your laws."



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



"Only the insider can make the decisions, not because he is inherently a better man, but because he is so placed that he can understand and can act."







"The uprooting of human beings from the land, the concentration in cities, the breakdown of the authority of family, of tradition, and of moral conventions, the complexity and the novelty of modern life, and finally the economic insecurity of our industrial system have called into being the modern social worker. They perform a function in modern society which is not a luxury but an absolute necessity."

"There is but one bond of peace that is both permanent and enriching: the increasing knowledge of the world in which experiment occurs."


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

"A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function."


"A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them."



"A large part of the mischief and folly of the world comes from rushing in, taking a position, and then not knowing how to retreat. There is something about making a speech or writing an article which perverts the human mind. When the utterance is published, the Rubicon has been crossed and the bridges have been burned. It seems to end in the inquiry, after that we almost cease to be interested in the truth, being so preoccupied to prove that we already possess it."


"Advertising, in fact, is the effort of business men to take charge of consumption as well as production. They are not content to supply a demand, as the text-books say; they educate the demand as well. In the end, advertising rests upon the fact that consumers are a fickle and superstitious mob, incapable of any real judgment as to what it wants or how it is to get what it thinks it would like. A bewildered child in a toy shop is nothing to the ultimate consumer in the world market of today. To say, then, that advertising is merely a way of calling attention to useful goods is a gorgeous piece of idealization. Advertising is in fact the weed that has grown up because the art of consumption is uncultivated."


"All achievement should be measured in human happiness."

"All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms."

"Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers’ glory -- to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served."






"Because courage consists in transcending normal fears, the highest kind of courage is cold courage; that is to say, courage in which the danger has been fully realized and there is no emotional excitement to conceal the danger."


