Walter Lippmann Quotes

I made a habit always to hear the Indians; and although they very often lie to me, I do not show them any displeasure for it, for I do not believe them and I do not decide anything until I have found out the truth.

I've heard everything that anybody can make up or spin, and I know how to cut right through and get to the heart of any issue.

Let the greatest part of the news thou hearest be the least part of what thou believest, lest the greater part of what thou believest be the least part of what is true.

The Darwinian adaptive trait of our time is the ability to figure out when we are being lied to on television.

When I say history is a matter of life and death, I mean this: If you really don't know history, you are a victim of whatever the authorities tell you. You have no way of checking up on them. You have no way of deciding whether there is any truth in what they are saying.

We're in a strange state in our world where we sort of have that belief - and I have it too - that if it's written down there's got to be some truth in it. We haven't quite got to the spot where you go: "Well, it doesn't necessarily mean it's true." It could actually be completely made up and made to look very nice. So, we have to get to the point where scandal and those kinds of things are less and less important because otherwise we won't have anyone willing to run as politicians.

If you tell me that the sky is red, I will look up.

The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.

You can't be distracted by the noise of misinformation.

In this day and age, much of journalism is about right or left, conservative or liberal, and 'The Observer' is just that: an observer. It is about truth.

I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn't ever have to rely on the press for my information.

Once we thought, journalists and readers alike, that if we put together enough 'facts' and gave them a fast stir, we would come up with something that, at least by the standards of short-order cooks, could be called the truth.

A good journalist is not the one that writes what people say, but the one that writes what he is supposed to write.

I'd rather see folks doubt what's true than accept what isn't.

I think it's time for the people and the press, in particular, to be more vigilant about not giving equal weight to lies as they give the truth.

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

Namely, we have no right to believe a thing true because everybody says so unless there are good grounds for believing that some one person at least has the means of knowing what is true, and is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.

A labouring man ... read and study halfe his time, and then be at a loss to know what is true and what not. Thus the few have almost ruined the Libberty of the press.

Every person must be his own watchman for the truth, because the forefathers did not trust government to separate the true from the false for us.

Even if we live in a post-truth culture, […] we do not live in a fact-free zone.

Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him.

I reject the idea that journalists are messengers of the truth. It’s arrogant. I think journalism is a search for the little relative truths that at best keep us relatively sane.

While I worry about an erosion of truth, I don’t think people want to live in a world where you can only say things that tech companies decide are 100 percent true.

We must fight for liberal ideas like openness, but also about having a media that we believe in and that can sort between real news and facts and not-so-factual things.

We are not going to get rid of the digital media - nor should we want to - and so our challenge is to use the media to determine the truth, rather than to let the media obfuscate matters.