A people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.
BILL MOYERSI take “We, the People” seriously because I don’t know how we build a civilization without reciprocity.
More Bill Moyers Quotes
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People who don’t believe in government are likely to defy our government.
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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.
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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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We have got to nurture the spirit of independent journalism in this country, or we’ll not save capitalism from its own excesses, and we’ll not save democracy from its own inertia.
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There are honest journalists like there are honest politicians – they stay bought.
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Charity provides crumbs from the table; justice offers a place at the table.
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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
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Television can stir emotions, but it doesn’t invite reflection as much as the printed page.
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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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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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Democracy doesn’t begin at the top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle what Arlo Guthrie calls ‘The Patriot’s Dream.
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Professionals give advice; pilgrims share wisdom.
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There’s hardly a more bitter pill to take than when a President disappoints the people who most believed in him.
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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.
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The President may not be listening, but the Senate is, and the public won this round. The House has a similar resolution under consideration.
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Witness the coupling of news and entertainment. See everyday people cast overboard as the pirates and predators of Wall Street seized the ship of state. I didn’t drift; I moved left just by standing still.
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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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How can those of us who are parents help our children recognize their bliss?
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Television is a medium. It is neither rare nor well done.
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War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.
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You do it because there’s a story to be told. 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.
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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.
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Beauty is an expression of that rapture of being alive.
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Watching the debate this afternoon it was apparent they loved term limits in the House – as Brutus loved Caesar.
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America is the longest argument in the world.
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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