Quotes from Bill Moyers

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

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.

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.

In uniform patriotism can salute one flag only, embrace but the first circle of life - one's own land and tribe. In war that is necessary, in peace it is not enough.

Lyndon Johnson believed the poor deserved a better life than the economy was providing them. He thought private power and greed had to be checked by a vibrant democracy.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

Civilization is but a thin veneer stretched across the passions of the human heart. And civilization doesn't just happen; we have to make it happen.

When a library is open, no matter its size or shape, democracy is open, too.

Constitutional democracy, you see, is no romantic notion. It's our defense against ourselves, the one foe who might defeat us.

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.

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

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.

Sharing is the essence of teaching. It is, I have come to believe, the essence of civilization . . . Without it, the imagination is but the echo of the self, trapped in a soundproof chamber, reverberating upon itself until it is spent in exhaustion or futility

Democracy belongs to those who exercise it.

secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of

Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through.