Bill Moyers Quotes

Democracy doesn't begin at the top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle what Arlo Guthrie calls 'The Patriot's Dream.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Democracy belongs to those who exercise it.

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.

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

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.

A free press is one where it's ok to state the conclusion you're led to by the evidence.

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

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.

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.

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.

Beauty is an expression of that rapture of being alive.

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

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.

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.

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

Democracy works when people claim it as their own

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.

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

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

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

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

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

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

Professionals give advice; pilgrims share wisdom.

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

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.

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

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.

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"

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.

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

I own and operate a ferocious ego.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through.

I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one

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

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

America is the longest argument in the world.

Democracy only works when we claim it as our own

They (the corporations) are counting on your patriotism to distract you from their plunder. They're counting on you to stand at attention with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance to the flag, while they pick your pocket.

Our children are being raised by appliances.

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

Constitutional democracy, you see, is no romantic notion. It's our defense against ourselves, the one foe who might defeat us.