Bill Moyers Quotes
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Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people.
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Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.
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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.
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Bullies - political bullies, economic bullies, and religious bullies - cannot be appeased; they have to be opposed with courage, clarity, and conviction. This is never easy. These true believers don't fight fair. Robert's Rules of Order is not one of their holy texts.
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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.
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Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.
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No wonder scoundrels find refuge in patriotism; it offers them immunity from criticism.
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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.
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Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel; historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition.
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All my life I've prayed the Lord's Prayer, but I've never prayed, 'Give me this day my daily bread.' It is always, 'Give us this day our daily bread.' Bread and life are shared realities. They do not happen in isolation. Civilization is an unnatural act. We have to make it happen, you and I, together with all the other strangers.
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I own and operate a ferocious ego.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I've thought everyone is a teacher.
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I work for him despite his faults and he lets me work for him despite my deficiencies.
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People who don't believe in government are likely to defile government.
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War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.
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Martin Luther King subpoened the nation's conscience. He was killed for it.
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We don't care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings.
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There are honest journalists like there are honest politicians - they stay bought.
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Standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.