Walter Lippmann Quotes

I have seen so many poets who were famous, who won all sorts of prizes, disappear with their death. I write as good as I can and don't try to turn that into some hope for a future that I could never know.

The most offensive egotist is he that fears to say "I" and "me." "It will probably rain" - that is dogmatic. "I think it will rain" - that is natural and modest. Montaigne is the most delightful of essayists because so great is his humility that he does not think it important that we see not Montaigne. He so forgets himself that he employs no artifice to make us forget him.

Writing, for me, means humility. It’s a process that involves fear and doubt, especially if you’re writing honestly.

They tell me that So-and-So, who does not write prefaces, is no charlatan. Well, I am. I first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands,and this . . . because . . . I am a natural-born mountebank.

Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

When I open my mouth and sing, the truth comes out. When I write, the truth comes out. I can't lie. That, I think, is one of the strongest elements of my music. When people talk about my writing as though I'm doing it from an accountant's perspective, it really pisses me off.

Life consists of positive and negative features, and I think that it is permissible to write about both.

I don't think you can separate a person's "style" and his persona. If you're writing or improvising honestly, you will inevitably reflect who you are.

I had got this far, and was thinking of what to say next, and as my habit is, I was pricking the paper idly with my pen. And I thought how, between one dip of the pen and the next, time goes on, and I hurry, drive myself, and speed toward death. We are always dying. I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or stop their ears, they are all dying.

I had fooled myself into thinking that I was something important to the rest of the world.

I'm going to write a book someday and the title will be I'm an Ass, You're an Ass. That's the most liberating, wonderful thing in the world, when you openly admit you're an ass. It's wonderful. When people tell me, You're wrong I say, What can you expect of an ass?

At times of writing I never think what I have said before. My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.

When the Lord finished the world, he pronounced it good. That is what I said about my first work, too. But Time, I tell you, Time takes the confidence out of these incautious opinions. It is more than likely that He thinks about the world, now, pretty much as I think about the Innocents Abroad. The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both.

I thought how tenuous the links were between mother and children between friends family things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost more easily than anyone could imagine.

It is a good rule in life to be wary of the company of people who think of themselves in the third person, no matter how well justified they might seem to be in doing so.

It is dishonorable to say one thing and think another; how much more dishonorable to write one thing and think another.

I think that in life, being is nothing but an illusion. If we acknowledge that and accept the fact that we are in between states, that we are moving, and this movement is the nature of our lives, and we stop having aspirations for being in a definite state, we know life better and are able to enjoy it better.

I’m not as cool as you think I think I might be – and the most important things in my life are God, love and peace. Everything else is b.s. And art’s kind of important, too.

When I started out in public life there used to be a saying we'd hear from time to time, that every man who runs for public office will claim that he was born in a log cabin he built with his own hands. Well, my mother knew better. And she made sure I did too.

Nothing lasts forever. Highs, lows, it's all fine. A little gentler with it. Because I really used to think things going well, for some reasons, would be much more terrifying internally than things being a bit chaotic for me.

It is easy to look at these waves, accomplishing so little and to think that no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we're really doing is rearranging the sand grains in a beach that in essence never changes.

We have no participation in Being, because all human nature is ever midway between being born and dying, giving off only a vague image and shadow of itself, and a weak and uncertain opinion. And if you chance to fix your thoughts on trying to grasp its essence, it would be neither more nor less than if your tried to clutch water.