Bill Moyers Quotes (27 Quotes)

As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I've thought everyone is a teacher.

This is the first time in my 32 years in public broadcasting that PBS has ordered up programs for ideological instead of journalistic reasons.

Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people.

Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.

Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

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.

I own and operate a ferocious ego.

A producer is a saboteur who tries to infiltrate the passivity of viewers and to create impressions that are lasting.

We don't care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings.

For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.

We see more and more of our Presidents and know less and less about what they do.

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.

A journalist is basically a chronicler, not an interpreter of events. Where else in society do you have the license to eavesdrop on so many different conversations as you have in journalism Where else can you delve into the life of our times.

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.

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.

Democracy belongs to those who exercise it.

Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.

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.

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.

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.

War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.

Watching the debate this afternoon it was apparent they loved term limits in the House as Brutus loved Caesar.

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America the struggle to determine whether we, the people is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality -- one nation, indivisible -- or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

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. We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. Otherwise, we are squeezed empty and filled with what other people want us to think and feel and experience.

Television can stir emotions, but it doesn't invite reflection as much as the printed page.