Home › Authors › Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers Quotes
1934–2025 United States
Bill Moyers (June 5, 1934 – June 26, 2025), born Billy Don Moyers, was an American journalist and political commentator. He served as the eleventh White House Press Secretary under the Johnson administration from 1965 to 1967.
United States Baptists Journalists Political commentators Also known as: Bill D. Moyers
Random Bill Moyers quote
27 quotes
Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel; historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition.
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.
A free press is one where it's okay to state the conclusion you're led to by the evidence.
Ed Murrow told his generation of journalists bias is okay as long as you don't try to hide it. So here, one more time, is mine: plutocracy and democracy don't mix.
"News is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity."
Like those populists of that earlier era, millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable.
For the life of me I cannot fathom why we expect so much from teachers and provide them so little in return.
No wonder scoundrels find refuge in patriotism; it offers them immunity from criticism.
Events enlarged his embrace to a wholly new idea of nation — the United States of America.
Plutocracy is not an American word but it's become an American phenomenon.
All my life I've prayed the Lord's Prayer, but I've never prayed, "Give me this day my daily bread." It is always, "Give us this day our daily bread." Bread and life are shared realities. They do not happen in isolation.
Freedom is not license but responsibility.
What we instantly got was a freak show of political pornography: lies, distortions, and half-truths — half-truths being perhaps the blackest of all lies.
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.
Standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.
People who don't believe in government are likely to defile government.
Jesus would not be crucified today. The prophets would not be stoned. Socrates would not drink the hemlock.
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.
Those rules divide the world into Democrats & Republicans, liberals & conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.
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.
Moyers on Democracy (2008)
Topics Bill Moyers is quoted on
Works