The struggle of ordinary people for a decent living, for security, is as old as the republic, but it’s taken on a new and urgent edge. Instead of shared prosperity our political system has now produced a winner-take-all economy.
BILL MOYERSLyndon Johnson believed the poor deserved a better life than the economy was providing them. He thought private power and greed had to be checked by a vibrant democracy.
More Bill Moyers Quotes
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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.
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An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias.
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Journalism’s been a continuing course in adult education for me.
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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.
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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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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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When I was growing up, I never heard anyone pray, “Give me this day my daily bread.” It was always, “Give us this day our daily bread.” That stuck. We’re all in this together.
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Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.
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We don’t care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings.
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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.
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I was not a public – I was not a thinker. I was a doer.
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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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Our economy is a plantation run for the aristocrats – the CEOs, hedge funds, private equity firms – while the field hands are left with the scraps.
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I’m the front man, I’m the man on camera, but there’s a whole team beyond me.
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Although I was brought up in a culturally and religious conservative culture, as a Baptist I was taught that no one has the right to subpoena your conscience.
BILL MOYERS