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Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.

Walter Lippmann

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Walter Lippmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 23
Died: 1974
Died: December 14
Journalist
Politician
Writer
New York City
New York
Necessarily
Custom
Seek
Prophecy
Taught
Preach
Teach
Revealed
Age
Reveal
Rather
Customs
Cannot
Ages
Unsettled
Must
Insight
Moralist

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To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
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If somebody can create an absolute system of beliefs and rules of conduct that will guide a business man at eleven o'clock in the morning, a boy trying to select a career, a woman in an unhappy love affair--well then, surely no pragmatist will object. He insists only that philosophy shall come down to earth and be tried out there.
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The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.
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Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
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When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
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The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.
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Run against the grain of a nation's genius and see where you get with your laws.
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He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
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Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
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The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.
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The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.
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Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.
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Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration.
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Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine.
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All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
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Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.
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We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.
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A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.
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Love endures when the lovers love many things together And not merely each other.
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It was in the recognition that there is in each man a final essence, that is to say an immortal soul which only God can judge, that a limit was set upon the dominion of men over men.
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