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At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.

Walter Lippmann

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Walter Lippmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: September 23
Died: 1974
Died: December 14
Journalist
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New York City
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Genius sees the dynamic purpose first, find reasons afterward.
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A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.
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There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
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Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable.
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The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.
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There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
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Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
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Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.
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Lovers who have nothing to do but love each other are not really to be envied love and nothing else very soon is nothing else.
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When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much.
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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.
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Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.
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The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.
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The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.
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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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Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.
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The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.
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In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
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You and I are forever at the mercy of the census-taker and the census-maker. That impertinent fellow who goes from house to house is one of the real masters of the statistical situation. The other is the man who organizes the results.
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Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.
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