by Walter Lippmann

We are an uprooted people, newly arrived, and nouveau riche.... We are blown hither and thither like litter before the wind. Our days are lumps of undigested experience. You have only to study what newspapers regard as news to see how we are torn and twisted by the irrelevant: in frenzy about issues that do not concern us, bored with those that do.

it would be hard to duplicate the ingenious answers [the Church] has found to human need: the cavernous mysteries of its cathedrals converging upon the enduring altar, the knowledge of an Eternal Family that survives the human one, the confessional where sin could be expressed and therefore purged, the vicarious atonement by which the consequences of human weakness were lifted off men's shoulders, the obliteration of death, the sense that wisdom was there inexhaustible and infallible. Those aren't idle dogmas, as foolish critics have imagined, but endlessly ingenious responses to the everyday wants of men and women

Belief does not live by logic, but by the need it fills, and absolutism quiets the uncertainties of the soul, finds answers to unsatisfied desire, and endows men with the sense that they are part of something greater than themselves.

human beings seem to be made in such a way that they cling passionately to the emotion of certainty. If only they can retain the feeling that God and Nature and history are with them, they go about with every appearance of conviction and practical power. They have far less bother about their souls than the modern man lost in a fog of introspection. For the believer in an absolute system has projected upon the world that certainty and harmony which he needs. His difficulties after that are merely matters of detail.

The distinction upon which I am dwelling does not, as one might suppose, cease to matter when the voters become enormously many. ...To multiply the voters makes it no more probable that a plurality of them will truly represent the public interest.

The conundrum springs from the fact that while The People as a corporate body are the true owners of the sovereign power, The People, as an aggregate of voters, have diverse, conflicting self-centered interests and opinions. A plurality of them cannot be counted upon to represent the corporate nation.

The doctrine of popular sovereignty is ancient and venerable. But until about the second half of the Nineteenth Century, it did not imply the enfranchisement of the people.

The history of Protestantism shows that the exercise of private judgment as to the meaning of Scripture leads not to universal and undeniable dogma, but to schism within schism and heresy within heresy.

the virtue of the Catholic system is that along with a dogmatic affirmation of the central facts, it provides a living authority in the Church which can ascertain and demonstrate and verify these facts.

For the great mass of men, if the history of religions is to be trusted, religious experience depends upon a complete in the concrete existence, one might almost say the materialization, of their God. The fundamentalist goes to the very heart of the matter, therefore, when he insists that you have destroyed the popular foundations of religion if you make your gospel a symbolic record of experience, and reject it as an actual record of events.