Bill Moyers Quotes

Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

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.

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

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

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.

Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.

In marriage, everyday you love,and everyday you forgive.It is an ongoing sacrament, love and forgiveness

I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one

Democracy doesn't begin at the top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle what Arlo Guthrie calls 'The Patriot's Dream.

You can't have a people's democracy as long as corporations are considered people.

Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow.

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.

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.

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.

Our media and political system has turned into a mutual protection racket.

Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel; historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition.

I really believe that coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.

Although our interests as citizens vary, each one is an artery to the heart that pumps life through the body politic, and each is important to the health of democracy.

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.

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

[Martin Luther] King subpoened the nation's conscience. He was killed for it.

I own and operate a ferocious ego.

News is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity.

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.

The delusional is no longer marginal.

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.

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.

The quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined.

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

There's hardly a more bitter pill to take than when a President disappoints the people who most believed in him.

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.

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

I take "We, the People" seriously because I don't know how we build a civilization without reciprocity.

How do we protect the soul of democracy against bad theology in service of an imperial state?

Democracy works when people claim it as their own

Democracy belongs to those who exercise it.

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.

Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.

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

When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind.

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.

I like what I do and keep thinking the best is yet to come.

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.

It's the people who are doing the nonviolent organizing at the grassroots that make me think there's still hope.

Our great progressive struggles have been waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich and privileged, share in the benefits of a free society.

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.

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.

Scientists investigate that which already is; Engineers create that which has never been. Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

Our children are being raised by appliances.