Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imi…

Walter Lippmann
112 citations
Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers glory - to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served.
Time
22

More Author Quotes

It is often very illuminating...to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?
A regime, an established order, is rarely overthrown by a revolutionary movement; usually a regime collapses of its own weakness and corruption and then a revolutionary movement enters among the ruin … ▶
The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being - which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs - where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolabl … ▶
It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor. ✨ Walter Lippmann (1914). A Preface to Politics
The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal. ✨ Walter Lippmann (1960). A Preface To Morals, p.43, Transaction Publishers

More Author Quotes

Most Cited Authors

The Best Quotes

Most Liked Authors

Curated Author Quotes