Bill Moyers
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.Collection: Positive
As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I've thought everyone is a teacher.Collection: Teacher
I own and operate a ferocious ego.Collection: Funny
War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Medical
Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.Collection: Politics
Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.
Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people.
For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.
Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.
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.
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.
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 work for him despite his faults and he lets me work for him despite my deficiencies.
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.
This is the first time in my 32 years in public broadcasting that PBS has ordered up programs for ideological instead of journalistic reasons.
Democracy belongs to those who exercise it.
We see more and more of our Presidents and know less and less about what they do.
There are honest journalists like there are honest politicians - they stay bought.
We don't care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings.
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.
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.
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.
At a time when the cost of health care is skyrocketing, the potential economic impact of mind/body medicine is considerable.
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.Collection: Party
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.Collection: Media
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.Collection: Party
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.Collection: Bark
The corporate right and the political right declared class warfare on working people a quarter of a century ago and they've won. Take the paradox of Rush Limbaugh, ensconced in a Palm Beach mansion massaging the resentments across the country of white-knuckled wage earners, who are barely making ends meet in no small part because of the corporate and ideological forces for whom Rush has been a hero.Collection: Country
People who don't believe in government are likely to defy our government.Collection: Believe
The quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined.Collection: Media
Our media and political system has turned into a mutual protection racket.Collection: Media
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.Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: Class
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Children
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 ... .Collection: Running
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.Collection: Lying
Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.Collection: Block
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Father
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.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Class
I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes oneCollection: Believe
I take "We, the People" seriously because I don't know how we build a civilization without reciprocity.Collection: Civilization
[Martin Luther] King subpoened the nation's conscience. He was killed for it.Collection: Kings
Empty your knapsack of all adjectives, adverbs and clauses that slo your stride and weaken your pace. Travel light. Remember the most memorable sentences in the English language are also the shortest: "The King is dead" and "Jesus wept."Collection: Jesus
...there is no more effective public interest watchdog in Washington, D.C.Collection: Integrity
When all our efforts have come to nothing, we naturally tend to doubt not just ourselves, but also whether God is just. At those moments, our only hope is to seek every evidence that God is just, by communing with the people we know who are strongest in faith.Collection: Faith