Edward R. Murrow famous quotes

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Sheep #Government #Political

I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Two #Stories #Sides

To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Truth #Honesty #Integrity

Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Inspirational #Failure #History

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Honesty #Hate #Integrity

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

#Truth #Communication #Information

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Peace #War #Teaching

To be credible we must be truthful.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Truthful #Being Truthful

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

#Truth #Lying #Simple

People say conversation is a lost art; how often I have wished it were.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Art #Communication #People

A blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts ... the body language of a man wishing urgently to be elsewhere.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Men #Wish #Body

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Conformity #Disloyalty #Dissent

A satellite has no conscience.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Science #Satellites #Conscience

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

#Complaining #Circus #Tvs

We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men ... We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Home #Men #Age

Just once in a while, let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Ideas #Information #Importance

I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage. Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live,
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Black And White #Reality #Color

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

#Butterfly #Differences #Novices

We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Media #Different #Allergies

The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Freedom #Philosophy #Work

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

#Mean Girls #Wisdom #Voice

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

#Sides #Burned #Heretic

No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Freedom #Liberty #Literature

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Mistake #Problem Solving #Obligation

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

#Communication #Technology #Computer

Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Sorry #Truth #Knowing Who You Are

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

#Honor #Fame #Individual

We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Fear #Age #Driven

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

#Real #Want #Firsts

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

#Believe #Politics #Taste

All babies look like Winston Churchill.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Baby #Looks

The obscure we always see sooner or later; the obvious always seems to take a little longer.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Littles #Obscure #Obvious

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

#Dust #Never Settle #Three

Good night, and good luck.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Good Night #Good Luck #Journalism

We will not be driven by fear ... if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Men #Remember #Driven

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

#Education #Light #Inspire

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

#Believe #America #Mature

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Inspirational #Freedom #Patriotic

There is a mental fear, which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor's yard and stampedes us to burn down this house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt, doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we had long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging. It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Fear #Taken #White

All I can hope to teach my son is to tell the truth and fear no man.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Son #Men #Telling The Truth

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

#War #Leaving #Survival

Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Confused #Humorous #Confusion

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

#Education #Teacher #Integrity

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

#Men #Fire #Discovery

Speaking of Sir Winston Churchill: He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Battle #Language #English Language

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

#Yesterday #Air #Tangible

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are 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

#Fear #Writing #Men

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

#Country #Men #Order

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

#Color #Aggravation #Numbers

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

#Art #Cutting #Political

A thing of orchestrated hell-a terrible symphony of light and flame.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Light #Flames #Symphony

We cannot make good news out of bad practice.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Practice #Government #News

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

#Book #Organization #People

Fame is morally neutral.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Fame

Tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue, and there are many who have no desire to live.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Desire #Tuberculosis #Fatigue

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

#Country #Voice #Understanding

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

#Real #Talking #Feet

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

#Art #Real #Moving

I would like television to produce some itching pills rather than this endless outpouring of tranquilizers..
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Pills #Television #Produce

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

#Life #Dream #Memories

Learn your language well and command it well, and you will have the first component to life.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Life #Firsts #Language

We are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks-that's show business.
-- Edward R. Murrow

#Business #Tents #Freak