Top 83 Murrow Quotes
#1. The script for this film was written 52 years ago by Edward R. Murrow, who taught us many valuable lessons about responsibility and always, always questioned authority, because without it authority often goes unchecked.
George Clooney
#2. Putting people in a room and strapping wires to their wrist to find out if I make them tingle when I'm telling them about Beirut is a long way from Edward R. Murrow.
Linda Ellerbee
#3. [Ed Murrow] admitted he was having trouble coming to grips with the idea of peace: "Trying to realize what has happened, one's mind takes refuge in the past. The war that was seems more real than the peace that has come.
Lynne Olson
#4. In the U.S., the '50s and '60s marked the documentary's golden age, especially at CBS, where pioneering television journalist Edward R. Murrow, immortalised in George Clooney's 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' produced such landmark investigations as the CBS Reports programme 'Hunger in America.'
Naomi Wolf
#5. CBS's Ed Murrow may have been over-celebrated as the principled observer for the masses, fair yet unafraid to take on the bullies.
Tina Brown
#6. Murrow covered something because it needed coverage. He wasn't trying to get an audience just for the sake of it.
Daniel Schorr
#7. What separated Ed Murrow from the rest of the pack was courage.
Dan Rather
#8. The Founding Fathers are always spinning in their graves over something, as is Ronald Reagan, or FDR. Edward R. Murrow is a perennial grave spinner in the news business (though in fact, Murrow was cremated).
Mark Leibovich
#9. In Europe, Murrow observed to his wife, people were dying and "a thousand years of civilization [were] being smashed" while America remained on the sidelines. How could one possibly be objective or neutral about that?
Lynne Olson
#10. Most people would think if you're the prime news anchor, then you should sort of be this Edward R. Murrow, Clark Kent guy with the family and 2.5 kids - or the perky, cute yet smart Katie Couric.
Don Lemon
#11. If anyone was talking about journalism in the '50s - it was Edward R.Murrow.
David Strathairn
#12. News, after all, is a spin of words and pictures. It's a kind of music. There are beats in a newscast, a newspaper story. Ed Murrow sounded like Ed Murrow. Huntley and Brinkley sounded different. Anderson Cooper, different still.
Robert Krulwich
#13. I'm delighted to carry on in the tradition of the great reporters like Edward R. Murrow, Ernie Pyle, and Geraldo Rivera to probe vitally important issues of the day, starting with whether I'm Hispanic or Latino.
Al Madrigal
#14. When you're creating a character out of nothing, you have to make all the guesses as to how they walk, how they talk, how they think. It was all there on the table for us to pick and choose for Murrow.
David Strathairn
#15. I don't think I could've carried the weight that Murrow carried.
David Strathairn
#16. We have no authoritative figure, no Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow whom we all listen to and trust to sort out contradictory claims. Instead, the media is splintered into a thousand fragments, each with its own version of reality, each claiming the loyalty of a splintered nation.
Barack Obama
#17. I am entirely persuaded that the American public is more reasonable, restrained and mature than most of the broadcast industry's planners believe. Their fear of controversy is not warranted by the evidence.
Edward R. Murrow
#18. Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.
Edward R. Murrow
#19. Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.
Edward R. Murrow
#20. We're not descended from fearful men - not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.
Edward R. Murrow
#21. If radio news is to be regarded as a commodity, only acceptable when saleable, then I don't care what you call it - I say it isn't news.
Edward R. Murrow
#22. All I can hope to teach my son is to tell the truth and fear no man.
Edward R. Murrow
#23. Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices
just recognize them.
Edward R. Murrow
#25. I am frightened by the imbalance, the constant striving to reach the largest possible audience for everything; by the absence of a sustained study of the state of the nation.
Edward R. Murrow
#26. In order to progress, radio need only go backward, to the time when singing commercials were not allowed on news reports, when there was no middle commercial on a news report, when radio was rather proud, alert and fast.
Edward R. Murrow
#27. Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice (and those thoughts we aren't interested in), people don't speak their beliefs easily, or publicly.
Edward R. Murrow
#28. If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.
Edward R. Murrow
#29. American traditions and the American ethic require us to be truthful, but the most important reason is that truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that.
Edward R. Murrow
#30. The fact that your voice is amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon you greater wisdom or understanding than you possessed when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other.
Edward R. Murrow
#31. I was greatly influenced by one of my teachers. She had a zeal not so much for perfection as for steady betterment-she demanded not excellence so much as integrity.
Edward R. Murrow
#32. Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.
Edward R. Murrow
#35. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.
Edward R. Murrow
#37. When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.
Edward R. Murrow
#39. Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
Edward R. Murrow
#40. The politician in my country seeks votes, affection and respect, in that order. With few notable exceptions, they are simply men who want to be loved.
Edward R. Murrow
#41. I have no feud, either with my employers, any sponsors, or with the professional critics of radio and television. But I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage.
Edward R. Murrow
#43. I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument.
Edward R. Murrow
#44. The obscure we always see sooner or later; the obvious always seems to take a little longer.
Edward R. Murrow
#46. No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.
Edward R. Murrow
#47. The right of dissent, or, if you prefer, the right to be wrong, is surely fundamental to the existence of a democratic society. That's the right that went first in every nation that stumbled down the trail toward totalitarianism.
Edward R. Murrow
#48. We will not be driven by fear ... if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men.
Edward R. Murrow
#50. Most truth's are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.
Edward R. Murrow
#51. The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.
Edward R. Murrow
#52. Language is the memory of man. Without it he has no past, a paltry present, and an empty future. With it he can bring his dreams to life.
Edward R. Murrow
#53. One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles.
Edward R. Murrow
#54. Tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue, and there are many who have no desire to live.
Edward R. Murrow
#55. To be persuasive, We must be believable,
To be believable, We must be credible,
To be credible, We must be truthful.
Edward R. Murrow
#56. A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There's nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I've done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom - it's gone.
Edward R. Murrow
#57. The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.
Edward R. Murrow
#58. A blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts ... the body language of a man wishing urgently to be elsewhere.
Edward R. Murrow
#59. If none of us ever read a book that was "dangerous," had a friend who was "different," or joined an organization that advocated "change," we would all be the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants.
Edward R. Murrow
#61. The politician is ... trained in the art of inexactitude. His words tend to be blunt or rounded, because if they have a cutting edge they may later return to wound him.
Edward R. Murrow
#62. Of this be wary. Honor and fame are often regarded as interchangeable. Both involve an appraisal of the individual ... but I suggest this difference. Fame is morally neutral.
Edward R. Murrow
#63. Don't be deluded into believing that the titular heads of the networks control what appears on their networks. They all have better taste.
Edward R. Murrow
#65. Language is one of the greatest gifts man has devised for himself. It ranks, alongside the discovery of fire and the wheel, as a major influence in making modern man what he is today.
Edward R. Murrow
#66. People say conversation is a lost art; how often I have wished it were.
Edward R. Murrow
#67. A thing of orchestrated hell-a terrible symphony of light and flame.
Edward R. Murrow
#68. It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation; they had not been executed. But the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last twelve years.
Edward R. Murrow
#69. I would like television to produce some itching pills rather than this endless outpouring of tranquilizers..
Edward R. Murrow
#70. Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
Edward R. Murrow
#71. We are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks-that's show business.
Edward R. Murrow
#72. The best speakers know enough to be scared ... the only difference between the pros and the novices is that the pros have trained the butterflies to fly in formation.
Edward R. Murrow
#73. It is not necessary to remind you of the fact that your voice, amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other, does not confer upon you greater wisdom than when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other. All of these things you know.
Edward R. Murrow
#74. It is almost impossible to substitute intelligence for experience.
Edward R. Murrow
#75. The only thing that counts is the right to know, to speak, to think - that, and the sanctity of the courts. Otherwise it's not America.
Edward R. Murrow
#76. The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.
Edward R. Murrow
#77. The real crucial link in the international exchange is the last three feet, which is bridged by personal contact, one person talking to another.
Edward R. Murrow
#78. It is well to remember that freedom through the press is the thing that comes first. Most of us probably feel we couldn't be free without newspapers, and that is the real reason we want the newspapers to be free.
Edward R. Murrow
#79. I have always been on the side of the heretics, against those who burned them, because the heretics so often turned out to be right ... Dead, but right.
Edward R. Murrow
#81. It has always seemed to me the real art in this business is not so much moving information or guidance or policy five or 10,000 miles. That is an electronic problem. The real art is to move it the last three feet in face to face conversation.
Edward R. Murrow
#82. This instrument [radio] can teach. It can illuminate, yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it's nothing but wires and lights in a box.
Edward R. Murrow
#83. Learn your language well and command it well, and you will have the first component to life.
Edward R. Murrow
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