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I believe democracy requires a ‘sacred contract’ between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works.

Bill Moyers

What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma – the science of the heart…the capacity to see, to feel, and then to act as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does.
BILL MOYERS

Believe Heart Need People
The Interfaith Alliance has to become an ongoing sustaining and powerful movement whose interest is to prove that religion has a healing side as well as a killing side, and that democracy is the consequence of conscience
BILL MOYERS

God Healing Powerful
Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel; historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition.
BILL MOYERS

Journalism Libel Mistakes
I’m the front man, I’m the man on camera, but there’s a whole team beyond me.
BILL MOYERS

Camera Men Team
If the watchdog doesn’t bark, how do you know there’s a burglar in the basement? And the press is supposed to be a watchdog.
BILL MOYERS

Bark Basements Supposed
Charity provides crumbs from the table; justice offers a place at the table.
BILL MOYERS

Charity Justice Tables
There are honest journalists like there are honest politicians – they stay bought.
BILL MOYERS

Honest Journalist Politician
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 MOYERS

Democracy Mark Veins
Charity is commendable; everyone should be charitable. But justice aims to create a social order in which, if individuals choose not to be charitable, people still don’t go hungry, unschooled or sick without care.
BILL MOYERS

Commitment Order Sick
The corporate right and the political right declared class warfare on working people a quarter of a century ago and they’ve won.
BILL MOYERS

Beach Country Hero Quater Working
Journalism’s been a continuing course in adult education for me.
BILL MOYERS

Adults Continuing Journalism
I can tell you that the job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is about as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.
BILL MOYERS

Jobs People Trying
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.
BILL MOYERS

Freedom Hands Writing
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.
BILL MOYERS

Degenerate Governance Politics Seminal
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.
BILL MOYERS

Fields Interesting Men
Why is the country not having this conversation, the kind of conversation that requires the politicians who are responsible for the war to be specific to the concerns of the American people.
BILL MOYERS

Country People War
The delusional is no longer marginal.
BILL MOYERS

Delusional Marginal People Person
Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.
BILL MOYERS

Block Democracy Long
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.
BILL MOYERS

Commitment Gone Information
We seem to prefer a comfortable lie to the uncomfortable truth. We punish those who point out reality, and reward those who provide us with the comfort of illusion. Reality is fearsome .. but experience tells us that more fearsome yet is evading it.
BILL MOYERS

Comfort Lying Reality
I believe democracy requires a ‘sacred contract’ between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works.
BILL MOYERS

Believe Media Trust
The rich today are richer, there are more of them, they have round-the-clock propaganda factories in Rupert Murdoch’s empire and rightwing talk radio, and corporate media have their back.
BILL MOYERS

Empires Media Radio
He even jeopardized his pledge to preserve women’s rights under Roe v. Wade in order to get a health care bill written by the corporate lapdog Max Baucus and the gang of revolving door mercenaries he hired to write a bill friendly to industry.
BILL MOYERS

Corporate Health Mercenaries Revolving Under Women
We see more and more of our Presidents and know less and less about what they do.
BILL MOYERS

Knows More President
Conservatism is less a set of ideas than it is a pathological distemper, a militant anger over the fact that the universe is not closed and life is not static.
BILL MOYERS

Facts Ideas Life Static
They’re counting on your patriotism to distract you from their plunder. They’re counting on you to be standing at attention with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance to the flag, while they pick your pocket!
BILL MOYERS

Hands Heart Over
In tracking down and eliminating terrorists, we need to change our metaphor from a “war on terror” – exactly what, pray tell, is that?
BILL MOYERS

Mind Police Tracking War

I believe democracy requires a ‘sacred contract’ between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works.

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I believe democracy requires a ‘sacred contract’ between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works.

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Popular Authors

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