Edward R. Murrow Quotes

Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.

Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.

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

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

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion - a lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the market place while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply.

We're 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.

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.

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

A satellite has no conscience.

The right of dissent, or, if you prefer, the right to be wrong, is surely fundamental to the existence of a democratic society. That's the right that went first in every nation that stumbled down the trail toward totalitarianism.

Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.

Most truth's are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.

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.

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.

The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

To be persuasive, We must be believable,
To be believable, We must be credible,
To be credible, We must be truthful.

Fame is morally neutral.

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.

It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation; they had not been executed. But the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last twelve years.

We cannot make good news out of bad practice.

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.

We are to a large extent an imitative society.

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.

All babies look like Winston Churchill.

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.

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

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

If radio news is to be regarded as a commodity, only acceptable when saleable, then I don't care what you call it - I say it isn't news.

We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.

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.

It is not necessary to remind you of the fact that your voice, amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other, does not confer upon you greater wisdom than when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other. All of these things you know.

I have said, and I believe, that potentially we have in this country a free enterprise system of radio and television which is superior to any other. But to achieve its promise, it must be both free and enterprising. There is no suggestion here that networks or individual stations should operate as philanthropies. But I can find nothing in the Bill of Rights or in the Communications Act which says that they must increase their net profits each year, lest the Republic collapse.

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

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.

No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.

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.

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