Bill Moyers Quotations

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.

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

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

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.

Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.

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

Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.

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.

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.

This is the first time in my 32 years in public broadcasting that PBS has ordered up programs for ideological instead of journalistic reasons.

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

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.

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

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

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

I work for him despite his faults and he lets me work for him despite my deficiencies.

We see more and more of our Presidents and know less and less about what they do.

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.

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 pornography : lies , distortions, and half-truths half-truths being perhaps the blackest of all lies. They paraded before us as informed opinion.

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.

Democracy only works when we claim it as our own

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.

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.....

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

Professionals give advice; pilgrims share wisdom.

Democracy belongs to those who exercise it.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

Television is a medium. It is neither rare nor well done.

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.

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.

The quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined.

I own and operate a ferocious ego.

Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.

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.

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.

There's 1,000 ways into addiction 1,000 ways out.

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

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

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

How can those of us who are parents help our children recognize their bliss?

Beauty is an expression of that rapture of being alive.

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.

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.

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."

Sure enough, as merger has followed merger, journalism has been driven further down the hierarchy of values in the huge conglomerates that dominate what we see, read and hear. And to feed the profit margins journalism has been directed to other priorities than "the news we need to know to keep our freedoms"

A profound transformation is happening here. The framers of our nation never envisioned these huge media giants; never imagined what could happen if big government, big publishing and big broadcasters ever saw eye-to-eye in putting the public's need for news second to their own interests. I approach the end of my own long run believing more strongly than ever that the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are inextricably joined ... .

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.

Watching the debate this afternoon it was apparent they loved term limits in the House - as Brutus loved Caesar.

Our children are being raised by appliances.

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.

The delusional is no longer marginal.

A producer is a saboteur who tries to infiltrate the passivity of viewers and to create impressions that are lasting.

Scientists investigate that which already is; Engineers create that which has never been. Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

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

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.

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

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.

Democracy works when people claim it as their own

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.

Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.

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

When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind.

I report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments-genuine savings-in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope.

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.

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

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.

Having lost faith in all else, zealots have nothing left but a holy cause to please a warrior God. They win if we become holy warriors, too; if we kill the innocent as they do; strike first at those who had not struck us; allow our leaders to use the fear of terrorism to make us afraid of the truth; cease to think and reason together, allowing others to tell what's in God's mind.

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.

Jon Stewart is a remarkable satirist and parodist in the vein of Mark Twain, because Jon Stewart understands what Mark Twain knew, which is that the truth goes down more easily in a democracy when it's marinated in humor.

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.

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

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.

The consensual seduction of the mainstream media by and with the government is one of the most dangerous toxins at work in America today.

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.

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.

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

The thing about war is that once it's triggered, it is unyielding in its appetite. And the more it consumes and gorges, the more it wants.

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.

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

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.

Our media and political system has turned into a mutual protection racket.

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.

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

But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy.

Presidents are afraid to lose wars. They're afraid to be outflanked on the right by the militarists. They don't want to be seen as soft on either communism or soft on terrorism or whatever. So presidents are constantly tugged away from their domestic commitments to foreign policy.

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

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.

I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one

I was not a public - I was not a thinker. I was a doer.

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.

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.

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.

In fact, so much of life, as you know, is serendipitous. That's why you better be prepared at any time for anything, because it may happen to you.