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

— Walter Lippmann

Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.

— Walter Lippmann

Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

— Walter Lippmann

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

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.

— Walter Lippmann

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.

— Walter Lippmann

The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.

— Walter Lippmann

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.

— Walter Lippmann

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.

— Walter Lippmann

The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.

— Walter Lippmann