The Phantom Public Quotes

“All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.”
― Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public

“These various remedies, eugenic, educational, ethical, populist and socialist, all assume that either the voters are inherently competent to direct the course of affairs or that they are making progress towards such an ideal. I think [democracy] is a false ideal.”
― Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public

“The public must be put in its place [...] so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.”
― Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public

“The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake. He knows he is somehow affected by what is going on. Rules and regulations continually, taxes annually and wars occasionally remind him that he is being swept along by great drifts of circumstance. Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers. As a private person he does not know for certain what is going on, or who is doing it, or where he is being carried. In the cold light of the experience he know that his sovereignty is a fiction. He reigns in theory, but in fact does not govern.”
― Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public

“The outsider is necessarily ignorant, usually irrelevant and often meddlesome, because he is trying to navigate the ship from dry land.”
― Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public