Edward R. Murrow Quotes
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Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.
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It seems to me that any action that arbitrarily limits the citizen's access to sight, sound and print, upon which opinion can be based, is, in the true sense of the phrase, un-American.
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If we go on as we are, we are protecting the mind of the American public from any real contact with the menacing world that squeezes in upon us. We are engaged in a great experiment to discover whether a free public opinion can devise and direct methods of managing the affairs of the nation. We may fail. But we are handicapping ourselves needlessly.
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Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice (and those thoughts we aren’t interested in), people don’t speak their beliefs easily, or publicly.
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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.
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We cannot make good news out of bad practice.
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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.
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This program is not a place where personal opinion should be mixed up with ascertainable facts...It is not, I think, humanly possible for any reporter to be completely objective, for we are all to some degree prisoners of our education, travel, reading-the sum total of our experience.
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Is it not possible that an unruly head of hair, an infectious smile, eyes that seem remarkable for the depths of their sincerity, a cultivated air of authority, may attract huge television audiences regardless of the violence that may be done to truth or objectivity?
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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.
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The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.
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If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.
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I am frightened by the imbalance, the constant striving to reach the largest possible audience for everything; by the absence of a sustained study of the state of the nation.
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A satellite has no conscience.
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He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.
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We are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks - that's show business.
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Good night, and good luck.
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I have reason to know, as do many of you, that when the evidence on a controversial subject is fairly and calmly presented, the public recognizes it for what it is-an effort to illuminate rather than to agitate.
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The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.
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This... is London.