Walter Lippmann Quotes

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion.

Headlines are so great in a sense that they can take a little bit from an article completely out of context and blow it into something it's not. Some people really only read headlines.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

Accusations fit on a bumper sticker. The truth is longer.

If you keep saying two plus two equals five over and over again, then that is what people are going to think. Maybe it does equal five if we keep changing the definition of what's normal and what's right and what's wrong.

Errors, to be dangerous, must have a great deal of truth mingled with them. It is only from this alliance that they can ever obtain an extensive circulation.

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.

Where are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

If you understand everything, you must be misinformed.

Folks really need to be very cautious about overanalyzing or overparsing what I've said to this reporter or that reporter.

I understand the difference between perception and reality.

There are some people in this world who always turn and twist the spoken word out of proportion.

People will hear one thing and just run with it.

I don't mind being asked anything! Not at all. I tell you what is annoying, is when you say something and somebody writes something that's completely different to what you said, and you're like, 'well that's not nice, because that's not what happened.'

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

Things definitely got out of perspective.

There's a great danger in making this seem more important than it is, this whole Free Cinema thing.

I'm the most misunderstood, misquoted person I know, honestly.

The problem with merely writing so that you can be understood is that the wrong people, in advancing their agendas, are only too ready to misunderstand you. Writing so that you cannot be misunderstood anticipates and preempts those who would willfully distort what you are trying to say.

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

A lot of beefs in the music industry are caused from miscommunication and just not really understanding what's going on, having people in your ear saying this is what somebody did, or this is what somebody did to you.

Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.

When you take somebody's quote out of context, which happens all the time, nobody's ever going to go and do the research on their own and figure out that you got it wrong.

If I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.