Bill Moyers Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Conservatives or better, pro-corporate apologists hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like "progress," "opportunity," and "individualism" into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right. This "degenerate and unlovely age," as one historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove the reputed brain of George W. Bush as the seminal age of inspiration for politics and governance of America today.

Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

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

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact embedded in a political contract 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.

The struggle of ordinary people for a decent living, for security, is as old as the republic, but it's taken on a new and urgent edge. Instead of shared prosperity our political system has now produced a winner-take-all economy.

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

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.

Sure enough, as merger has followed merger, journalism has been driven further down the hierarchy of values in the huge conglomerates that dominate what we see, read and hear. And to feed the profit margins journalism has been directed to other priorities than "the news we need to know to keep our freedoms"

Television is a medium. It is neither rare nor well done.

The fault line in American history is now a dividing line in the election and it's changing the conversation.

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.

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 report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments-genuine savings-in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope.

The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly "veneration of wealth " are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined.

Our children are being raised by appliances.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.