Bill Moyers quotes

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous. (Bill Moyers)
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. View quote
Bill Moyers
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. View quote
Bill Moyers
People who don't believe in government are likely to defy our government. View quote
Bill Moyers
[Martin Luther] King subpoened the nation's conscience. He was killed for it. View quote
Bill Moyers
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. View quote
Bill Moyers
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. View quote
Bill Moyers
News is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity. View quote
Bill Moyers
Standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country. View quote
Bill Moyers
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. View quote
Bill Moyers
Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people. (Bill Moyers)
Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel; historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition. View quote
Bill Moyers
I own and operate a ferocious ego. View quote
Bill Moyers
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. View quote
Bill Moyers
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. View quote
Bill Moyers
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. View quote
Bill Moyers
In marriage, everyday you love,and everyday you forgive.It is an ongoing sacrament, love and forgiveness. View quote
Bill Moyers
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 Fanaticism|true believers don't fight fair. Robert's Rules of Order is not one of their holy texts. View quote
Bill Moyers
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. View quote
Bill Moyers
We don't care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings. View quote
Bill Moyers
For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. (Bill Moyers)
There are honest journalists like there are honest politicians - they stay bought. View quote
Bill Moyers
Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of. View quote
Bill Moyers
As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I've thought everyone is a teacher. View quote
Bill Moyers
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. View quote
Bill Moyers