Education Quote by Walter Lippmann

Lippmann is gutting a particular kind of modern menace: the person who doesn’t merely hold a strong opinion, but claims a hotline to destiny. “Pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission” is doing double work. It casts these figures as frauds (pretenders) while indicting the seduction that makes them persuasive: a promise of certainty in a world that’s structurally uncertain. The sentence is built to foreclose debate on purpose. “There is no arguing” isn’t resignation; it’s diagnosis. If someone’s authority is presented as sacred, disagreement becomes heresy, not discourse.

The subtext is Lippmann’s lifelong suspicion of absolutism dressed up as public service. As a journalist and democratic realist, he saw how mass politics and propaganda rewarded moral theater over epistemic humility. “Divine mission” is a secular critique aimed at political movements that act like religions: revolutionaries, nationalists, ideologues, even technocrats who treat expertise as revelation rather than method. Lippmann doesn’t say they’re wrong on the facts; he says their posture makes them unreachable. Pride isn’t just a personal flaw here; it’s a political technology that immunizes a leader or movement against correction.

The final phrase, “perennial temptation,” widens the frame beyond any one era. He’s pointing to an evergreen human appetite: to swap the hard work of provisional thinking for the comfort of ordained purpose. In Lippmann’s worldview, democracy survives only if no one gets to claim divine certainty while holding worldly power.