Bill Moyers Quotations | Page 2

Standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

America is the longest argument in the world.

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.

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