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When we were covering the 2008 campaign I told my young African American colleagues that despite the historical significance of victory, Barack Obama was going to break their hearts.

Bill Moyers

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

Charity Justice Tables
The delusional is no longer marginal.
BILL MOYERS

Delusional Marginal People Person
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 MOYERS

Die Less People Questions Skeptical
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.
BILL MOYERS

Facts May Prepared
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
There are honest journalists like there are honest politicians – they stay bought.
BILL MOYERS

Honest Journalist Politician
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
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
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
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
When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.
BILL MOYERS

Always Blind Fact Ideology Politicians
There’s hardly a more bitter pill to take than when a President disappoints the people who most believed in him.
BILL MOYERS

People Pills President
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
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.
BILL MOYERS

Country Cutting Direction One
War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.
BILL MOYERS

Imagination Self War
Fox News and Rush Limbaugh have raised ignorance to ideology and stupefied an entire political party. No more roguish and rowdy band of predators ever did more to demean and despoil the democracy on whose carcass they feed.
BILL MOYERS

Ignorance Party Political
As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I’ve thought everyone is a teacher.
BILL MOYERS

Students Teacher Teaching
The quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined.
BILL MOYERS

Democracy Media Quality
Barack Obama strikes me as a man of strong principles and weak convictions – the kind of guy who would rather teach constitutional law than practice it, or who’d rather watch the match alone on TV than arm-wrestle his opponents.
BILL MOYERS

Country Law Men President Strong
Lyndon 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.
BILL MOYERS

Democracy Economy Greed
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 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
Standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.
BILL MOYERS

Country Government Mean
The most encouraging sign is that 71 percent of the public believe the system is profoundly corrupted by the power of money. Ninety-six percent of the people believe it’s “important” that we reduce the influence of money.
BILL MOYERS

Believe People Thinking
In uniform patriotism can salute one flag only, embrace but the first circle of life – one’s own land and tribe. In war that is necessary, in peace it is not enough.
BILL MOYERS

Circles Enough Land Tribe War
Unless 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.
BILL MOYERS

Blue Fighting Nuts
For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.
BILL MOYERS

First Firsts Monopoly Time

When we were covering the 2008 campaign I told my young African American colleagues that despite the historical significance of victory, Barack Obama was going to break their hearts.

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When we were covering the 2008 campaign I told my young African American colleagues that despite the historical significance of victory, Barack Obama was going to break their hearts.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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