Bill Moyers Quotes

#1. Civilization is but a thin veneer stretched across the passions of the human heart. And civilization doesn't just happen; we have to make it happen. - Author: Bill Moyers

#2. This is the first time in my 32 years in public broadcasting that PBS has ordered up programs for ideological instead of journalistic reasons. - Author: Bill Moyers

#3. I have seen hate born of fear, hate speaking in the name of God and truth, hate holding up a distorting mirror to fellow human beings. - Author: Bill Moyers

#4. Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life. - Author: Bill Moyers

#5. I believe democracy requires a 'sacred contract' between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works. - Author: Bill Moyers

#6. We have got to nurture the spirit of independent journalism in this country, or we'll not save capitalism from its own excesses, and we'll not save democracy from its own inertia. - Author: Bill Moyers

#7. Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel; historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition. - Author: Bill Moyers

#8. America's corporate and political elites
now form a regime of their own and
they're privatizing democracy. All the
benefits - the tax cuts, policies and
rewards flow in one direction: up. - Author: Bill Moyers

#9. As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I've thought everyone is a teacher. - Author: Bill Moyers

#10. The quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined. - Author: Bill Moyers

#11. A journalist is basically a chronicler, not an interpreter of events. Where else in society do you have the license to eavesdrop on so many different conversations as you have in journalism? Where else can you delve into the life of our times? - Author: Bill Moyers

#12. Sharing is the essence of teaching. It is, I have come to believe, the essence of civilization ... Without it, the imagination is but the echo of the self, trapped in a soundproof chamber, reverberating upon itself until it is spent in exhaustion or futility - Author: Bill Moyers

#13. When a library is open, no matter its size or shape, democracy is open, too. - Author: Bill Moyers

#14. Television can stir emotions, but it doesn't invite reflection as much as the printed page. - Author: Bill Moyers

#15. The Interfaith Alliance has to become an ongoing sustaining and powerful movement whose interest is to prove that religion has a healing side as well as a killing side, and that democracy is the consequence of conscience - Author: Bill Moyers

#16. I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one - Author: Bill Moyers

#17. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. - Author: Bill Moyers

#18. Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism. - Author: Bill Moyers

#19. Democracy doesn't begin at the top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle what Arlo Guthrie calls 'The Patriot's Dream. - Author: Bill Moyers

#20. There is no more effective public interest watchdog in Washington, D.C. - Author: Bill Moyers

#21. The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone. - Author: Bill Moyers

#22. There is no more important struggle for American democracy than ensuring a diverse, independent and free media. Free Press is at the heart of that struggle. - Author: Bill Moyers

#23. Charity provides crumbs from the table; justice offers a place at the table. - Author: Bill Moyers

#24. Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself. - Author: Bill Moyers

#25. The delusional is no longer marginal. - Author: Bill Moyers

#26. What's right and good doesn't come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. - Author: Bill Moyers

#27. In those days [1955], affirmative action was for whites only. I might still be working for the grocery store in the small Texas town where I grew up were it not for affirmative action for Southern white boys. - Author: Bill Moyers

#28. The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly "veneration of wealth " are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined. - Author: Bill Moyers

#29. Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people. - Author: Bill Moyers

#30. In uniform patriotism can salute one flag only, embrace but the first circle of life-one's own land and tribe. In war that is necessary, in peace it is not enough. - Author: Bill Moyers

#31. Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance. Faith-based charity provides crumbs from the table; faith-based justice offers a place at the table. - Author: Bill Moyers

#32. Conservatism is less a set of ideas than it is a pathological distemper, a militant anger over the fact that the universe is not closed and life is not static. - Author: Bill Moyers

#33. They (the corporations) are counting on your patriotism to distract you from their plunder. They're counting on you to stand at attention with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance to the flag, while they pick your pocket. - Author: Bill Moyers

#34. We see more and more of our Presidents and know less and less about what they do. - Author: Bill Moyers

#35. Our media and political system has turned into a mutual protection racket. - Author: Bill Moyers

#36. Professionals give advice; pilgrims share wisdom. - Author: Bill Moyers

#37. A producer is a saboteur who tries to infiltrate the passivity of viewers and to create impressions that are lasting. - Author: Bill Moyers

#38. secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of - Author: Bill Moyers

#39. If you think there is freedom of the press in the United States, I tell you there is no freedom of the press ... They come out with the cheap shot. The press should be ashamed of itself. They should come to both sides of the issue and hear both sides and let the American people make up their minds - Author: Bill Moyers

#40. Television is a medium. It is neither rare nor well done. - Author: Bill Moyers

#41. Watching the debate this afternoon it was apparent they loved term limits in the House - as Brutus loved Caesar. - Author: Bill Moyers

#42. America is the longest argument in the world. - Author: Bill Moyers

#43. We seem to prefer a comfortable lie to the uncomfortable truth. We punish those who point out reality, and reward those who provide us with the comfort of illusion. Reality is fearsome .. but experience tells us that more fearsome yet is evading it. - Author: Bill Moyers

#44. These are the now-endangered markers of a civilized society: legally ordained minimum wages, child labor laws, workers safety and compensation laws, pure foods and safe drugs, Social Security, Medicare and rules that promote competitive markets over monopolies and cartels. - Author: Bill Moyers

#45. In marriage, everyday you love,and everyday you forgive.It is an ongoing sacrament, love and forgiveness - Author: Bill Moyers

#46. Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous. - Author: Bill Moyers

#47. There are honest journalists like there are honest politicians - they stay bought. - Author: Bill Moyers

#48. News is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity. - Author: Bill Moyers

#49. We don't care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings. - Author: Bill Moyers

#50. Democracy works when people claim it as their own - Author: Bill Moyers

#51. Beauty is an expression of that rapture of being alive. - Author: Bill Moyers

#52. Standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country. - Author: Bill Moyers

#53. Our great progressive struggles have been waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich and privileged, share in the benefits of a free society. - Author: Bill Moyers

#54. The most fundamental liberal failure of the current era: the failure to embrace a moral vision of America based on the transcendent faith that human beings are more than the sum of their material appetites, our country is more than an economic machine, and freedom is not license but responsibility. - Author: Bill Moyers

#55. How do we protect the soul of democracy against bad theology in service of an imperial state? - Author: Bill Moyers

#56. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. - Author: Bill Moyers

#57. When all our efforts have come to nothing, we naturally tend to doubt not just ourselves, but also whether God is just. At those moments, our only hope is to seek every evidence that God is just, by communing with the people we know who are strongest in faith. - Author: Bill Moyers

#58. If being tolerant of differing opinions, if believing that America has to make it as a pluralistic nation, if being civil, if that makes you a liberal, I plead guilty. - Author: Bill Moyers

#59. War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination. - Author: Bill Moyers

#60. You only have to glance at the daily news to see how passions are stirred by claims of exclusive loyalty to one's own kin, one's own clan, one's own country, and one's own church. These ties that bind are vital to our communities and our lives, but they can also be twisted into a noose. - Author: Bill Moyers

#61. Empty your knapsack of all adjectives, adverbs and clauses that slo your stride and weaken your pace. Travel light. Remember the most memorable sentences in the English language are also the shortest: "The King is dead" and "Jesus wept." - Author: Bill Moyers

#62. I own and operate a ferocious ego. - Author: Bill Moyers

#63. Although our interests as citizens vary, each one is an artery to the heart that pumps life through the body politic, and each is important to the health of democracy. - Author: Bill Moyers

#64. I work for him despite his faults and he lets me work for him despite my deficiencies. - Author: Bill Moyers

#65. We now know that a neo-conservative is an arsonist who sets the house on fire and six years later boasts that no one can put it out. - Author: Bill Moyers

#66. When I learn something new - and it happens every day - I feel a little more at home in this universe, a little more comfortable in the nest. - Author: Bill Moyers

#67. What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma - the science of the heart ... the capacity to see, to feel, and then to act as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does. - Author: Bill Moyers

#68. How can those of us who are parents help our children recognize their bliss? - Author: Bill Moyers

#69. Democracy only works when we claim it as our own - Author: Bill Moyers

#70. Constitutional democracy, you see, is no romantic notion. It's our defense against ourselves, the one foe who might defeat us. - Author: Bill Moyers

#71. Democracy belongs to those who exercise it. - Author: Bill Moyers

#72. Democracy may not prove in the long run to be as efficient as other forms of government, but it has one saving grace: it allows us to know and say that it isn't. - Author: Bill Moyers

#73. Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder. - Author: Bill Moyers

#74. People who don't believe in government are likely to defile government. - Author: Bill Moyers

#75. Our children are being raised by appliances. - Author: Bill Moyers

#76. [Martin Luther] King subpoened the nation's conscience . He was killed for it. - Author: Bill Moyers