Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 105 of Walter Lippmann’s often deeply insightful (yet sometimes deeply flawed) 1937 book, The Good Society:

Thus, in a kind of tragic irony, the search for security and a rational society, if it seeks salvation through political authority, ends in the most irrational form of government imaginable – in the dictatorship of casual oligarchs, who have no hereditary title, no constitutional origin or responsibility, who cannot be replaced except by violence. The reformers who are staking their hopes on good despots, because they are so eager to plan the future, leave unplanned that on which all their hopes depend. Because a planned society must be one in which the people obey the rulers, there can be no plan to find the planners: the selection of the despots who are to make society so rational and so secure has to be left to the insecurity of irrational chance.

DBx: Pictured here is Walter Lippmann (1889-1974).