Maddie > Maddie's Quotes

“But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“Thus the essence of freedom of opinion is not in mere toleration as such, but in the debate which toleration provides: it is not in the venting of opinion, but in the confrontation of opinion.”
― Walter Lippmann

“Only the consciousness of a purpose that is greater than any man can seed and fortify the souls of men”
― Walter Lippmann

“We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception. They mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the difference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar, and the somewhat strange as sharply alien. They”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn't a human relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn't move in a strange direction. We don't know how to behave when personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. There are no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that wasn't made for a simpler age. We have changed our environment faster than we can change ourselves.”
― Walter Lippmann

“Millions of those who are watching...can read hardly at all. Millions more can read the words but cannot understand them. Of those who can both read and understand, a good three-quarters we may assume have some part of half an hour a day to spare for the subject. To them the words so acquired are the cue for a whole train of ideas which we allow the words we read to evoke form the biggest part of the original data of our opinions. The world is vast, the situations that concern us are intricate, the messages are few, the biggest part of opinion must be constructed in the imagination.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“When all think alike, no one thinks very much”
― Walter Lippmann

“The sovereign people determines life and death and happiness under conditions where experience and experiment alike show thought to be most difficult.

"The intolerable burden of thought.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“Now sensitiveness to the state of mind of the public is a difficult thing to achieve or maintain. Any man can tell you with more or less accuracy and clearness his own reactions on any particular issue. But few men have the time or the interest or the training to develop a sense of what other persons think or feel about the same issue. In his own profession the skilled practitioner is sensitive and understanding. lhe lawyer can tell what argument will appeal to court or jury. “The salesman can tell what points to stress to his prospective buyers. The politician can tell what to emphasize to his audience, but the ability to estimate group reactions on a large scale over a wide geographic and psychological area is a specialized ability which must be developed with the same painstaking self-criticism and with the same dependence on experience that are required for the development of the clinical sense in the doctor or the surgeon. The significant revolution of modern times is not industrial or economic or political, but the revolution which is taking place in the art of creating consent among the governed. Within the
life of the new generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the world alone, the only constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the cardinal dogma of democracy that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart.
Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception and to farms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.”
― Walter Lippmann

“Whatever truth you contribute to the world will be one lucky shot in a thousand misses. You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions.”
― Walter Lippmann

“We must insist that free oratory is only the beginning of free speech; it is not the end, but a means to an end. The end is to find the truth. The practical justification of civil liberties is not that self-expression is one of the rights of man. It is that the examination of opinion is one of the
necessities of man. For experience tells us that it is only when freedom of opinion becomes the compulsion to debate that the seed which our fathers planted has produced its fruit. When that is
understood, freedom will be cherished not because it is a vent for our opinions but because it is the surest method of correcting them.”
― Walter Lippmann

“Decidedly we shall not be safe if we forget the things of the mind. Indeed, if we want to save our souls, the mind must lead a more athletic life than it has ever done before, and must more passionately than ever practice and rejoice in art. For only through art can we cultivate annoyance with inessentials, powerful and exasperated reactions against ugliness, a ravenous appetite for beauty; and these are the true guardians of the soul.”
― Walter Lippmann

“The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.”
― Confucius

“The purpose of life, as far as I can tell… is to find a mode of being that’s so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

“The things that pose the greatest threats to your survival are the most real things.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“People organize their brains with conversation. If they don't have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds. Like hoarders, they cannot unclutter themselves.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Nietzsche said that a man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Always place your becoming above your current being.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“So, listen, to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise. Tell the truth. Or, at least, don’t lie.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“It's a luxury to pursue what makes you happy; it's a moral obligation to pursue what you find meaningful.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness,”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself. That does not only mean that you suppress who you are, although it also means that. It means that so much of what you could be will never be forced by necessity to come forward.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“We cannot navigate, without something to aim at and, while we are in this world, we must always navigate.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos