Daily Inspiration Quote by Walter Lippmann

Conscience, Lippmann insists, is less a holy compass than a social organ: adaptive, trained, and occasionally reprogrammed. The line has the cool bite of a journalist puncturing a comforting myth. People want morality to feel timeless because timelessness protects us from accountability. If my conscience is eternal, then my choices are inevitable. If it evolves, then I can be wrong, and so can my era.

The phrasing is doing quiet but forceful work. "Vessel of eternal verities" sounds like a church reliquary, something sealed and authoritative. Lippmann rejects that image and swaps in a developmental metaphor: conscience "grows". Growth implies environment, nutrition, pressure, and, crucially, vulnerability. Your moral intuition is not discovered; it's cultivated. That’s an unsettling proposition in a culture that treats "I just feel" as a moral credential.

The subtext is political. Lippmann is talking about modernity’s churn: industrial capitalism, mass media, urbanization, migration, new roles for women, the rise of bureaucratic states. These shifts didn’t merely change laws; they changed what felt shameful, what counted as duty, what kinds of suffering were visible. A "new social condition" doesn’t tweak conscience at the edges; it can flip it. Practices once defended as natural (child labor, segregation, marital coercion) become indefensible when the social world makes different lives legible.

There’s a warning embedded here, too. If conscience is socially produced, it can be socially managed. Progress is possible; propaganda is, too. Lippmann’s realism cuts both ways: morality can advance, but it’s never immune from the conditions that manufacture it.