Bill Moyers Quotes

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

"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."

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

"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."

"Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life."

"I work for him despite his faults and he lets me work for him despite my deficiencies."

"Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of."

"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."

"There are honest journalists like there are honest politicians - they stay bought."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous."

"I own and operate a ferocious ego."

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