"What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority."

Lippmann, Walter on Democracy
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"This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement -- that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it -- that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings."

Lippmann, Walter on Democracy
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"Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles."

Lippmann, Walter on Democracy
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"Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power"

Lippmann, Walter on Desire
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"In really hard times the rules of the game are altered. The inchoate mass begins to stir. It becomes potent, and when it strikes, it strikes with incredible emphasis. Those are the rare occasions when a national will emerges from the scattered, specialized, or indifferent blocs of voters who ordinarily elect the politicians. Those are for good or evil the great occasions in a nation's history."

Lippmann, Walter on Difficulties
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"No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people."

Lippmann, Walter on Education
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"Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign."

Lippmann, Walter on Elections
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"There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation."

Lippmann, Walter on Evangelism
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"A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment."

Lippmann, Walter on Freedom
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"An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department."

Lippmann, Walter on Alliances
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"It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most."

Lippmann, Walter on Government
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"When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists."

Lippmann, Walter on Humanism
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"The decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as the mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as something more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes and chemical reactions. For, unless man is something more than that, he has no rights that anyone is bound to respect, and there are no limitations upon his conduct which he is bound to obey."

Lippmann, Walter on Humankind
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"The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples."

Lippmann, Walter on Immigration
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"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."

Lippmann, Walter on Law and Lawyers
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"The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on. The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully."

Lippmann, Walter on Leaders and Leadership
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"The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force."

Lippmann, Walter on Majority
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"When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute."

Lippmann, Walter on Media
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"The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions. It is only when they work by a steady light of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation intelligible enough for a popular decision."

Lippmann, Walter on Media
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"In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority."

Lippmann, Walter on Minorities
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"The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth."

Lippmann, Walter on Mistakes
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"The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary."

Lippmann, Walter on Moralists
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"There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral."

Lippmann, Walter on Morality
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"The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense."

Lippmann, Walter on Opposition
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"If all power is in the people, if there is no higher law than their will, and if by counting their votes, their will may be ascertained -- then the people may entrust all their power to anyone, and the power of the pretender and the usurper is then legitimate. It is not to be challenged since it came originally from the sovereign people."

Lippmann, Walter on People
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