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Walter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann Biography

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“The modern skeptical world has been taught for some 200 years a conception of human nature in which the reality of evil, so well-known to the age of faith, has been discounted. Almost all of us grew up in an environment of such easy optimism that we can scarcely know what is meant, though our ancestors knew it well, by the satanic will. We shall have to recover this forgotten but essential truth ‑ along with so many others that we lost when, thinking we were enlightened and advanced, we were merely shallow and blind.”

Sin
Author:Walter Lippmann
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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. As our minds become more deeply aware of their own subjectivism, we find a zest in objective method that is not otherwise there. We see vividly, as normally we should not, the enormous mischief and casual cruelty of our prejudices. And the destruction of a prejudice, though painful at first, because of its connection with our self-respect, gives an immense relief and a fine pride when it is successfully done. There is a radical enlargement of the range of attention. As the current categories dissolve, a hard, simple version of the world breaks up. The scene turns vivid and full. There follows an emotional incentive to hearty appreciation of scientific method, which otherwise it is not easy to arouse, and is impossible to sustain. Prejudices are so much easier and more interesting. For if you teach them at first as victories over the superstitions of the mind, and the exhilaration of the chase and of the conquest may carry the pupil over that hard transition from his self-bound experience to the phase where his curiosity has matured, and his reason has acquired passion.”

Pg 257The Appeal To The Public
Book:Public Opinion
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“The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts; it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.”

IfsKindLittlesDifferentFactsNamesInformationEssentialsDiscoveryIntuitionMaturityDifferent KindsLocationSequence
Book:The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy
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“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.”

StatesGovernmentIndividualExerciseAuthorityIllusionVotePressureMajorityOrganizedMinoritiesVotersRegulationEvidentBureaucracyFragmentsCompulsionComprehensiveSusceptible
Author:Walter Lippmann
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“The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.”

IfsFirstsMayEnergyLossEffortClassCivilizationSucceedTragedyStructureUnionsDemocraticConquerJungleFixingAmerican LifeCooperatives
Book:Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
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“Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.”

KnowsGivingMayRealLyingLibertyMastersBlessingGiving UpDifficultySlaveAwakeningGladSettlingUncomfortableSettling DownRacketAnnouncingLive Your Own Life
Book:Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
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“Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are.”

IfsThinkingLifeShouldHappensLife IsActorsBehindsCareersOur LivesEventsDramaSceneBlindPushingPullingAmazedInclinationBehind The Scenes
Book:Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
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“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.”

PeopleActionChurchCommonOpinionClassDangerEnjoyedRuthlessHeresyRenaissanceBourgeoisInterferenceSuppressionInquisitionAristocratic
Book:Men of Destiny (Ppr)
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“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.”

FactsWealthCuttingMembersFunctionIncreaseIncomeUselessAcquireFundEfficiencyDistribution
Book:Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
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“The life of a savage is beset by glowering terrors: from birth to death he lives in an animated world; where the sun and the stars, sticks, stones, and rivers are obsessed with his fate. He is busy all the time in a ritual designed to propitiate the abounding jealousies of nature. For his world is magical and capricious, the simplest thing is occult.”

WorldStarsSunFateBirthRiversStonesSticksBusyTerrorObsessedRitualSavagesSimplestAnimatedOccultCapricious
Book:The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy
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“The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society. They are an ordered more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world, people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We are members.”

PeopleWorldFeelsWellsMayHomeCertainKnownPositionHabitFitComfortTasteMembersCapacityTraditionDefenseExpectedCoreConsistentStereotypeWell KnownAdapted
Author:Walter Lippmann
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“Since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole.”

LooksDifferentWholeFactsLastsMoralDangerousJudgmentAccountsFoundationDenyAcceptedVersionsAliensExplanationOpponentsAssuranceSapMoral Judgment
Book:Public Opinion
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“The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake. He knows he is somehow affected by what is going on. Rules and regulations continually, taxes annually and wars occasionally remind him that he is being swept along by great drifts of circumstance. Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers.”

IfsKnowsWayFeelsMindWarTodayBehindsMysteryOughtCitizensCircumstancesSceneTaxesAffairInvisibleManageAwakeAffectedRegulationDeafConvincingSpectatorsBehind The ScenesPublic AffairsRules And Regulations
Book:The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy
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