Bill Moyers famous quotes

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.
-- Bill Moyers

#Freedom #Writing #Hands

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

#Marriage #Wedding #Forgiving

We have to face the unpleasant as well as the affirmative side of the human story, including our own story as a nation, our own stories of our peoples. We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. Otherwise, we are squeezed empty and filled with what other people want us to think and feel and experience.
-- Bill Moyers

#Reality #Thinking #Views

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.
-- Bill Moyers

#Cutting #One Direction #America

Charity is commendable; everyone should be charitable. But justice aims to create a social order in which, if individuals choose not to be charitable, people still don't go hungry, unschooled or sick without care. Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance.
-- Bill Moyers

#Commitment #Order #People

Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.
-- Bill Moyers

#Dream #Freedom #Tyrants

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.
-- Bill Moyers

#Creativity #Piercings #Mundane

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.
-- Bill Moyers

#Commitment #Justice #Tables

Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow.
-- Bill Moyers

#Motivational #Ideas #Arrows

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
-- Bill Moyers

#Thinking #Issues #People

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

#Teacher #Teaching #Students

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

#People #Ethics #Stranger

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

#Justice #Charity #Tables

A free press is one where it's okay to state the conclusion you're led to by the evidence . One reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism . Those rules divide the world into Democrats & Republicans , liberals & conservatives , and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if instead of reporting the truth behind the news , they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.
-- Bill Moyers

#Jobs #Opportunity #Play

Democracy works when people claim it as their own
-- Bill Moyers

#People #Democracy #Claims

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.
-- Bill Moyers

#Heart #Voting #Democracy

I really believe that coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.
-- Bill Moyers

#Spiritual #Believe #Way

Capitalism is out of control, thanks in no small part to Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision which said that a corporation is a person, even though it doesn't eat, drink, make love, sing, raise children or take care of aging parents. You can't have a people's democracy as long as corporations are considered people.
-- Bill Moyers

#Children #Long #People

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.
-- Bill Moyers

#Trust #Believe #Democracy

I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one
-- Bill Moyers

#Believe #Texas #People

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.....
-- Bill Moyers

#Believe #Teaching #Echoes

I've always thought the American eagle needed a left wing and a right wing. The right wing would see to it that economic interests had their legitimate concerns addressed. The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. Both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it's no longer an eagle and it's going to crash.
-- Bill Moyers

#Eagles #Wings #Two

"In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether "we, the people" is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality - one nation, indivisible - or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others."
-- Bill Moyers

#Spiritual #Powerful #Struggle

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.
-- Bill Moyers

#Faith #People #Effort

There are honest journalists like there are honest politicians - they stay bought.
-- Bill Moyers

#Honest #Politician #Journalist

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.
-- Bill Moyers

#Country #Freedom #Responsibility

Democracy only works when we claim it as our own
-- Bill Moyers

#Democracy #Claims

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

#Firsts #Monopoly #First Time

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.
-- Bill Moyers

#Education #Home #Learning

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.
-- Bill Moyers

#War #Land #Circles

Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.
-- Bill Moyers

#Oxygen #Hyperbole #Johnson

Conservatives or better, pro- corporate apologists hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like " progress ," " opportunity ," and " individualism " into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right ... This "degenerate and unlovely age," as one historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove the reputed brain of George W. Bush as the seminal age of inspiration for politics and governance of America today.
-- Bill Moyers

#Inspiration #Opportunity #Vocabulary

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

#Reflection #Television #Pages

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.
-- Bill Moyers

#Running #Government #Long

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?
-- Bill Moyers

#Events #Different #Journalism

David Rockefeller is the most conspicuous representative today of the ruling class, a multinational fraternity of men who shape the global economy and manage the flow of its capital. Rockefeller was born to it, and he has made the most of it. But what some critics see as a vast international conspiracy, he considers a circumstance of life and just another day's work... In the world of David Rockefeller it's hard to tell where business ends and politics begins
-- Bill Moyers

#Men #Class #World

In tracking down and eliminating terrorists , we need to change our metaphor from a "war on terror" exactly what, pray tell, is that? to the mind-set of Interpol tracking down master criminals through intense global cooperation among nations, or the FBI stalking the Mafia , or local police determined to quell street gangs without leveling the entire neighborhood in the process.
-- Bill Moyers

#War #Police #Mind

The corporate right and the political right declared class warfare on working people a quarter of a century ago and they've won ... Take the paradox of Rush Limbaugh, ensconced in a Palm Beach mansion massaging the resentments across the country of white-knuckled wage earners, who are barely making ends meet in no small part because of the corporate and ideological forces for whom Rush has been a hero.
-- Bill Moyers

#Country #Beach #Hero

On the eve of the election last month my wife Judith and I were driving home late in the afternoon and turned on the radio for the traffic and weather. What we instantly got was a freak show of political ***** : lies , distortions, and half-truths half-truths being perhaps the blackest of all lies. They paraded before us as informed opinion.
-- Bill Moyers

#Lying #Home #Weather

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.
-- Bill Moyers

#Father #Office #Constitution

Here is the crisis of the times as I see it: We talk about problems, issues, policies, but we don't talk about what democracy means what it bestows on us the revolutionary idea that it isn't just about the means of governance but the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.
-- Bill Moyers

#Mean #Agency #Ideas

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

#Mistake #Journalism #Libel

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

#Believe #Government #People

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

#Kings #Luther #Conscience

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.
-- Bill Moyers

#Boys #White #Texas

Reagan 's story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control a Jeffersonian ideal at the roots of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and license to buy the political system right out from everyone else.
-- Bill Moyers

#Father #Mean #Responsibility

I hear an almost inaudible but pervasive discontent with the price we pay for our current materialism. And I hear a fluttering of hope that there might be more to life than bread and circuses.
-- Bill Moyers

#Strength #Might #Pay

I own and operate a ferocious ego.
-- Bill Moyers

#Ego

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.
-- Bill Moyers

#Ideas #Facts #Life Is

Democracy belongs to those who exercise it.
-- Bill Moyers

#Exercise #Democracy

Standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.
-- Bill Moyers

#Country #Mean #Government

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.
-- Bill Moyers

#Fire #Years #House

The quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined.
-- Bill Moyers

#Media #Democracy #Quality

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.
-- Bill Moyers

#Lying #Fighting #Media

You can't have a people's democracy as long as corporations are considered people.
-- Bill Moyers

#Long #People #Democracy

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.
-- Bill Moyers

#Commitment #Gone #Television

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

#Children #Television #Care

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

#Political #Soul #Democracy

Professionals give advice; pilgrims share wisdom.
-- Bill Moyers

#Inspirational #Giving #Advice

...there is no more effective public interest watchdog in Washington, D.C.
-- Bill Moyers

#Integrity #Interest

Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.
-- Bill Moyers

#Couple #Reality #Religion

Television is a medium. It is neither rare nor well done.
-- Bill Moyers

#Fun #Done #Television

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
-- Bill Moyers

#God #Powerful #Healing

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

#People #News #Want

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.
-- Bill Moyers

#Religious #Believe #America

Beauty is an expression of that rapture of being alive.
-- Bill Moyers

#Beauty #Expression #Alive

There is a historic strain of dominion theology which says, taking its references from the Psalms, that man is made just a little lower than God, and that we are the crown of creation. That interpretation has come at the expense of the one that says when God, in the story of Noah, intervened to save human life against the flood, against the acts of nature, He did not stop with human beings. He made sure that every kind of animal was represented twice on that ark.
-- Bill Moyers

#Men #Animal #Littles

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

#Democracy #Library #Shapes

America is the longest argument in the world.
-- Bill Moyers

#America #World #Argument

There's 1,000 ways into addiction 1,000 ways out.
-- Bill Moyers

#Addiction #Way

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

#War #Self #Imagination

Big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government. The White House, the Congress and, increasingly, the judiciary, reflect their interests. We appear to have a government run by remote control from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute. To hell with everyone else.
-- Bill Moyers

#Running #America #Government