Public Opinion

by Walter Lippmann

quay

To expect that all men for all time will go on thinking different things, and yet doing the same things, is a doubtful speculation.

breviary

The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do. It does not determine what they will achieve.

Those features of the world outside which have to do with the behavior of other human beings, in so far as that behavior crosses ours, is dependent upon us, or is interesting to us, we call roughly public affairs.

analysis of the nature of news and of the economic basis of journalism seems to show that the newspapers necessarily and inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.

pertinacity

hecatombs.

augurs

chautauqua,

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.

clang

pother,

go to sea, or into a quiet place, and we remember how cluttered, how capricious, how superfluous and clamorous is the ordinary urban life of our time.

tarantella

An unfamiliar scene is like the baby's world, "one great, blooming, buzzing confusion."

fete

inviolability

plutocrat.

useful history is antiseptic in this fashion.

solecism

obdurate

perfidiously

epicure,

votaries.

Thus the rule that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you rests on the belief that human nature is uniform.

jingo

theory I am suggesting is that, in the present state of education, a public opinion is primarily a moralized and codified version of the facts.

difference is imposed by the difference between the capitalist and socialist pattern of stereotypes.

It is only when we are in the habit of recognizing our opinions as a partial experience seen through our stereotypes that we become truly tolerant of an opponent.

Ruritanian.

mortmain

The longest duration which we immediately feel is what is called the "specious present."

azoic

coteries

harrow.

sexual passion and fighting, and the two have so many associations with each other, blend into each other so intimately, that a fight about sex outranks every other theme in the breadth of its appeal. There is none so engrossing or so careless of all distinctions of culture and frontiers.

cognitive processes, and the actual bodily movements by which the instinct achieves its end may be indefinitely complicated.

augury.

changelings

conation

But he who captures the symbols by which public feeling is for the moment contained, controls by that much the approaches of public policy.

sacrée

indemnities.

catspaw

plebiscite;

Except on a few subjects where our own knowledge is great, we cannot choose between true and false accounts. So we choose between trustworthy and untrustworthy reporters.

the utmost independence that we can exercise is to multiply the authorities to whom we give a friendly hearing.

some such hierarchy exists. In American politics we call it a machine, or "the organization."

routineers.