Walter Lippmann

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.

Walter Lippmann

When all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

Walter Lippmann

We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.

Walter Lippmann

Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.

Walter Lippmann

Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.

Walter Lippman Public Opinion

A distinguished art critic has said [Footnote: Bernard Berenson,
_The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance_, pp. 60, _et
seq_.] that "what with the almost numberless shapes assumed by an
object. ... What with our insensitiveness and inattention, things
scarcely would have for us features and outlines so determined and
clear that we could recall them at will, but for the stereotyped
shapes art has lent them." The truth is even broader than that, for
the stereotyped shapes lent to the world come not merely from art, in
the sense of painting and sculpture and literature, but from our moral
codes and our social philosophies and our political agitations as
well. Substitute in the following passage of Mr. Berenson's the words
'politics,' 'business,' and 'society,' for the word 'art' and the
sentences will be no less true: "... unless years devoted to the study
of all schools of art have taught us also to see with our own eyes, we
soon fall into the habit of moulding whatever we look at into the
forms borrowed from the one art with which we are acquainted. There is
our standard of artistic reality. Let anyone give us shapes and colors
which we cannot instantly match in our paltry stock of hackneyed forms
and tints, and we shake our heads at his failure to reproduce things
as we know they certainly are, or we accuse him of insincerity."

Walter Lippman Public Opinion

The mass of absolutely illiterate, of
feeble-minded, grossly neurotic, undernourished and frustrated
individuals, is very considerable, much more considerable there is
reason to think than we generally suppose. Thus a wide popular appeal
is circulated among persons who are mentally children or barbarians,
people whose lives are a morass of entanglements, people whose
vitality is exhausted, shut-in people, and people whose experience has
comprehended no factor in the problem under discussion. The stream of
public opinion is stopped by them in little eddies of misunderstanding,
where it is discolored with prejudice and far fetched analogy.

Lewis Carroll

"Let the jury consider their verdict," the king said, for about the twentieth time that day.
"No, no! " said the queen. " Sentence first-verdict afterwards."

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Hanna Arendt

Triste est le sort des héros qui ne sont pas morts d'une mort héroïque.