Walter Lippmann Biography Quotes 38 Report mistakes

38 Quotes
Occup.	Journalist
From	USA
Born	September 23, 1889 New York City, New York, United States
Died	December 14, 1974 New York City, New York, United States
Aged	85 years

Early life and education
Walter Lippmann was born in 1889 in New York City to a German Jewish family and grew up amid the expanding commercial and cultural life of the metropolis. Precocious and bookish, he entered Harvard College as a teenager and studied philosophy and psychology under figures who shaped his intellectual temperament. George Santayana and William James, each in distinct ways, taught him to balance skepticism with a pragmatic interest in lived experience. He also developed a lasting friendship with the young law professor Felix Frankfurter, who encouraged his engagement with public affairs. At Harvard, Lippmann wrote for student publications and began to see journalism as a vocation equal parts inquiry and public service.

Early career and The New Republic
After college he gravitated to progressive political circles in New York, spending time around the muckraker Lincoln Steffens and writing for reform-minded magazines. In 1914, he joined Herbert Croly and Walter Weyl in founding The New Republic, a weekly backed by Dorothy Payne Whitney and Willard Straight. The magazine became an intellectual anchor for the American progressive movement, and Lippmann, still in his mid-twenties, quickly emerged as one of its sharpest voices. His early books, including A Preface to Politics (1913) and Drift and Mastery (1914), tested the capacities of modern government to steer an industrial society without succumbing to dogma. He was already preoccupied with how citizens gather facts, form judgments, and entrust decision-making to institutions.

War work and the Wilson years
The First World War drew Lippmann from editorial rooms into policy work. He served in the War Department and then joined The Inquiry, the group assembled under Colonel Edward M. House to shape a postwar settlement. Working with House and geographer Isaiah Bowman, Lippmann contributed research and drafting that fed into President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and the American delegation's preparation for the Paris Peace Conference. The experience impressed on him the complexity of diplomacy and the power, and danger, of political rhetoric. By the time he returned to journalism after the armistice, he had seen both the possibilities of enlightened statecraft and the stubborn limits of public opinion.

Public Opinion and the problem of democracy
In 1922 he published Public Opinion, the book that secured his place among the most influential analysts of media and democracy. Lippmann argued that citizens necessarily rely on simplified mental "pictures" to navigate a complicated world, leaving them vulnerable to manipulation and to what he called the "manufacture of consent". Two years later, in The Phantom Public, he deepened his skepticism, suggesting that modern society would inevitably depend on expert knowledge and that journalism should function as a disciplined searchlight rather than a partisan megaphone. These ideas made him a touchstone for scholars of communication and a controversial figure among activists who believed in a more participatory ideal.

From the New York World to the Herald Tribune
Lippmann shifted from magazine editor to daily newspaper columnist in the 1920s, joining the New York World under the Pulitzer family and writing editorials that combined close reading of events with broader theory. With Charles Merz he published "A Test of the News" (1920), a landmark content analysis criticizing the New York Times's reporting on the Russian Revolution. When the World closed in 1931, Lippmann launched his "Today and Tomorrow" column at the New York Herald Tribune, a space he would occupy for decades. His prose was measured, often austere, and it attracted a national audience: policymakers read him to take the temperature of elite opinion, and general readers turned to him for perspective rather than polemic.

The New Deal and The Good Society
During the Great Depression, Lippmann initially welcomed Franklin D. Roosevelt's energy and experimentation. Yet he grew wary of ad hoc improvisation and the potential for centralized authority to calcify into bureaucracy. The Good Society (1937) distilled his mature liberalism: he defended a market order tempered by legal safeguards and social insurance, but warned against planning schemes that, in his view, risked coercion and inefficiency. He remained on amicable but independent terms with New Deal figures, often praising competence while criticizing overreach. Al Smith, Herbert Croly, and other contemporaries figured in his assessments, but Lippmann resisted identification with any faction.

War, peace, and the early Cold War
As Europe slid toward conflict again, Lippmann argued for a realistic foreign policy grounded in interests and balance, not slogans. During the Second World War he supported the Allied cause and thought hard about the institutions that might secure a durable peace. In the late 1940s he entered one of his most consequential debates, engaging George F. Kennan's "X" article on containment. In a series of columns later collected as The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (1947), Lippmann questioned open-ended commitments that could entangle the United States on unfavorable terms. His critique, which brought him into argument with officials like Dean Acheson, helped define the spectrum of early Cold War strategy. Although not alone in using the phrase, his writings did much to popularize "cold war" as a description of the emerging global standoff.

Influence, awards, and relationships with statesmen
By midcentury Lippmann was the country's best-known public philosopher of politics. Presidents, cabinet secretaries, and diplomats, from Woodrow Wilson to John F. Kennedy, read him closely. He advised without seeking office, meeting with leaders in private and sometimes opening a public conversation with a column rather than a memo. He opposed demagoguery and nativism, defended civil liberties, and insisted that successful policy required clarity about ends as well as means. His "Today and Tomorrow" pieces earned him two Pulitzer Prizes, and in 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The honors never softened his skepticism; he continued to press officials to match commitments to resources and to align rhetoric with reality.

Vietnam and the end of "Today and Tomorrow"
The Vietnam War sharpened Lippmann's long-standing cautions about overextension. He urged negotiations and a regional balance less tethered to abstractions about credibility. His relationship with policymakers remained cordial but strained when he believed the government was misreading the limits of American power. In 1967, after nearly four decades, he concluded the "Today and Tomorrow" column, though he continued to write essays and give lectures. Younger journalists and scholars, including those who disagreed with his elitist leanings, acknowledged his intellectual consistency and his insistence that common sense and institutional design mattered more than partisan passion.

Personal life
Lippmann married Faye Albertson in 1917; the marriage ended in divorce two decades later. In 1938 he married Helen Armstrong, with whom he shared the rest of his life. He kept his private world largely out of print, preferring to let the authorial persona of the column carry his public identity. Friends and colleagues often remarked on the combination of reserve and warmth that marked his conversation. He had no children and devoted his energies to reading, writing, and a small circle of confidants that included fellow writers and officials.

Legacy
Walter Lippmann died in 1974, closing a career that had traced, and helped shape, American political thought from the Progressive Era through the Cold War. He left an extensive bibliography: books such as Liberty and the News, Public Opinion, The Phantom Public, The Good Society, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, and Essays in the Public Philosophy, as well as thousands of columns that modeled a style of reasoning rooted in evidence and modesty about what any one mind can know. He helped institutionalize the idea that journalism should test claims against facts, even while acknowledging how facts are filtered by perception. He treated politics as an art of limitation, in which leaders like Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson navigated choices more than they solved riddles. His exchanges with figures like George Kennan and Dean Acheson set terms of debate that endured long after the immediate arguments had passed. Few journalists have occupied a comparable perch between the academy, the newsroom, and the state, and fewer still have left a vocabulary by which later generations continue to argue about democracy, expertise, and the uses of power.

Our collection contains 38 quotes who is written by Walter, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Justice - Leadership.

Other people realated to Walter: Randolph Bourne (Writer), Ronald Steel (Writer)

Walter Lippmann Famous Works