Jon Stewart is a remarkable satirist and parodist in the vein of Mark Twain, because Jon Stewart understands what Mark Twain knew, which is that the truth goes down more easily in a democracy when it’s marinated in humor.
BILL MOYERSUnless you’re willing to fight and refight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every detail to make certain you’ve got it right, and then take hit after unfair hit accusing you of bias, there’s no use even trying.
More Bill Moyers Quotes
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Barack Obama seemed to think he could win over his enemies. He certainly seemed to believe too much in his own powers of persuasion. One thing’s for sure – he misunderstood the nature of his adversaries.
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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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Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.
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In fact, so much of life, as you know, is serendipitous. That’s why you better be prepared at any time for anything, because it may happen to you.
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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.
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Lyndon Johnson was thirteen of the most interesting and difficult men I ever met. He could be as couth as he was uncouth, as magnanimous as malicious, at times proud and sensitive, at times paranoid and darkly uneasy with himself. Freud would have had a field day with him.
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Scientists investigate that which already is; Engineers create that which has never been. Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.
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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.
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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.
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Although our interests as citizens vary, each one is an artery to the heart that pumps life through the body politic, and each is important to the health of democracy.
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People who don’t believe in government are likely to defy our government.
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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 … .
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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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Professionals give advice; pilgrims share wisdom.
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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.
BILL MOYERS