Walter Lippmann Quotes

Some people think we're adrift without any guidelines. I don't. I think we've had instruction on how to live.

Torah values are the ones that inform my life.

If you deny that any principles of conduct at all are common to and admitted by all men who try to behave reasonably - well, I don't see how you can have any ethics or any ethical background for law.

Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it.

I'm very pragmatic.

If the end does not justify the means - what can?

I cannot remember a time when the Golden Rule was not my motto and precept, the torch that guided my footsteps.

The fundamental basis of ethics must be chosen in some non-scientific way.

Lay down true principles and adhere to them inflexibly.

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes.

I'm pragmatic.

I believe that it's better to have a conviction, believe strongly in something, and then the convictions create a style that reflects your mentality.

I live my life by certain standards.

Philosophy is not just about talking or lecturing or even reading long, dense books. In fact, it is something men and women of action use - and have used throughout history - to solve their problems and achieve their greatest triumphs. Not in the classroom but on the battlefield, in the forum, and at court.

I think I'm pragmatic.

Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked. Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.

I have never lived on principles. When I have had to act, I never first asked myself on what principles I was going to act, but I went at it and did what I thought fit. I have often reproached myself for my want of principle.

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.

Duty is a better guide than stars or statutes.

Men who have lost their conviction of what is good and what is bad find themselves without a sextant to check their position by. We are in the position of a man with an elaborate camping kit who finds himself lost in the woods without his matches; to kindle a fire he has to resort to the stratagems of the caveman. We fall back through generations into the oldest terrors and confusions of the race.

As she read the ten commandments for the first time, a Chinese woman said, "I don't see how anyone can very well get on without them."

If you going to live by a certain code - as Bob Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody.

I don’t have any mottoes. If I did I would forever be contradicting them.

In the past, the respect people had for religion meant that ethical practice was maintained through a majority following one religion or another. But this is no longer the case. We must therefore find some other way of establishing basic ethical principles.

A man's got to have a code, a creed to live by, no matter his job.