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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

Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance.
BILL MOYERS

Charity Circumstances Commitment Personal Wealth
As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I’ve thought everyone is a teacher.
BILL MOYERS

Students Teacher Teaching
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
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

Informed Opinion Perhaps Political
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it – as if the cause depends on you, because it does.
BILL MOYERS

Causes Doe Fighting
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.
BILL MOYERS

Issues Mean Revolutionary Ideas
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
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
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
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
Watching the debate this afternoon it was apparent they loved term limits in the House – as Brutus loved Caesar.
BILL MOYERS

Afternoon House Limit Term
The fault line in American history is now a dividing line in the election and it’s changing the conversation.
BILL MOYERS

Country Election Fault History
I was not a public – I was not a thinker. I was a doer.
BILL MOYERS

Doers Public Thinkers
Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance. Faith-based charity provides crumbs from the table; faith-based justice offers a place at the table.
BILL MOYERS

Charity Commitment Justice
I hear an almost inaudible but pervasive discontent with the price we pay for our current materialism. And I hear a fluttering of hope that there might be more to life than bread and circuses.
BILL MOYERS

might Pay Strength
Television can stir emotions, but it doesn’t invite reflection as much as the printed page.
BILL MOYERS

Pages Reflection Television
News is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity.
BILL MOYERS

News People Want
For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.
BILL MOYERS

First Firsts Monopoly Time
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.
BILL MOYERS

Reality Thinking Views
We now know that a neo-conservative is an arsonist who sets the house on fire and six years later boasts that no one can put it out.
BILL MOYERS

Fire House Years
Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.
BILL MOYERS

Block Democracy Long
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
Barack Obama treated too lightly the people and forces determined to destroy him. They spat in his face and didn’t even get ticketed for a misdemeanor.
BILL MOYERS

Determined Faces People
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.
BILL MOYERS

Done Journalist Reporting Truth
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
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
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

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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