Top 151 Quotes & Sayings by Bill Moyers
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Bill Moyers.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
At a time when the cost of health care is skyrocketing, the potential economic impact of mind/body medicine is considerable.
I work for him despite his faults and he lets me work for him despite my deficiencies.
There are honest journalists like there are honest politicians - they stay bought.
Today, the practice of medicine in an urban, technological society rarely provides either the time or the environment to encourage a doctor-patient relationship that promotes healing.
Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people.
When I learn something new - and it happens every day - I feel a little more at home in this universe, a little more comfortable in the nest.
We don't care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings.
Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.
Every once in a while, a book so possesses me that I happily give up a couple of consecutive nights of sleep - as well as the evening news broadcasts and latenight talk shows - to finish it. That's what happened when I opened the novel 'Shadow Tag' by Louise Erdrich.
As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I've thought everyone is a teacher.
When my brother died in 1966, my father began a grieving process that lasted almost twenty-five years. For all that time, he suffered from chronic, debilitating headaches. I took him to some of the country's major medical facilities, but no one could cure him of his pain.
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.
Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.
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.
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.
Democracy may not prove in the long run to be as efficient as other forms of government, but it has one saving grace: it allows us to know and say that it isn't.
For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.
Someone asked why I invited Jon Stewart to be the first guest on the 'Journal''s premiere in 2007. 'Because Mark Twain isn't available,' I answered. I was serious.
I own and operate a ferocious ego.
Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.
Democracy belongs to those who exercise it.
War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.
We see more and more of our Presidents and know less and less about what they do.
Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.
This is the first time in my 32 years in public broadcasting that PBS has ordered up programs for ideological instead of journalistic reasons.
[Martin Luther] King subpoened the nation's conscience. He was killed for it.
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.
A profound transformation is happening here. The framers of our nation never envisioned these huge media giants; never imagined what could happen if big government, big publishing and big broadcasters ever saw eye-to-eye in putting the public's need for news second to their own interests. I approach the end of my own long run believing more strongly than ever that the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are inextricably joined ... .
In tracking down and eliminating terrorists, we need to change our metaphor from a "war on terror" - exactly what, pray tell, is that? - to the mind-set of Interpol tracking down master criminals through intense global cooperation among nations, or the FBI stalking the Mafia, or local police determined to quell street gangs without leveling the entire neighborhood in the process.
The quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined.
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.
It's the people who are doing the nonviolent organizing at the grassroots that make me think there's still hope.
I have seen hate born of fear, hate speaking in the name of God and truth, hate holding up a distorting mirror to fellow human beings.
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. Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance.
An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, 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.
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.
Charity provides crumbs from the table; justice offers a place at the table.
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.
When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind.
These are the now-endangered markers of a civilized society: legally ordained minimum wages, child labor laws, workers safety and compensation laws, pure foods and safe drugs, Social Security, Medicare and rules that promote competitive markets over monopolies and cartels.
The massive upward distribution of wealth engineered by our political class over the last few decades has solidified the plutocratic control of the rule-making machinery in Washington and state capitals.
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.
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.
There is no more important struggle for American democracy than ensuring a diverse, independent and free media. Free Press is at the heart of that struggle.
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.
In America, one of our two major parties is dominated by extremists dedicated to destroying the social contract, and the other party has been so enfeebled by two decades of collaboration with the donor class it can offer only feeble resistance to the forces that are devastating everyday people.
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!
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.
Reagan's story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control a Jeffersonian ideal at the roots of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and license to buy the political system right out from everyone else.
In marriage, everyday you love,and everyday you forgive.It is an ongoing sacrament, love and forgiveness
The Supreme Court consistently favors organized money and the political privileges of the corporate class. We have a Senate that is more responsive to affluent constituents than to middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of income distribution have no apparent effect at all on the Senate's roll call votes.
Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.
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.
Our media and political system has turned into a mutual protection racket.
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.
Our children are being raised by appliances.
I've lived long enough to see the triumph of zealots and absolutists, to watch money swallow politics, to witness the rise of the corporate state. See the party of working and poor people become a sycophant of crony capitalism. Watch the union of church and state become fashionable again. 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.
I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one
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.
Capitalism is out of control, thanks in no small part to Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision which said that a corporation is a person, even though it doesn't eat, drink, make love, sing, raise children or take care of aging parents. You can't have a people's democracy as long as corporations are considered people.
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