110+ Bill Moyers Quotes On Education, Religion And Constitution

Bill Moyers was an American journalist and political commentator. He worked with the Johnson administration in the 1960s, and later became a renowned television journalist. He hosted several programs on PBS, including Bill Moyers Journal, and was awarded numerous honors for his work. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Bill Moyers on education, life, religion.

Top 10 Bill Moyers Quotes

1. Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.
2. Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.
3. As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I've thought everyone is a teacher.
4. Charity provides crumbs from the table; justice offers a place at the table.
5. 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.
6. In marriage, everyday you love,and everyday you forgive.It is an ongoing sacrament, love and forgiveness
7. Democracy doesn't begin at the top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle what Arlo Guthrie calls 'The Patriot's Dream.
8. You can't have a people's democracy as long as corporations are considered people.
9. Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow.
10. 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.

Bill Moyers Image Quotes

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous. — Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers Short Quotes

• Our media and political system has turned into a mutual protection racket.
• I own and operate a ferocious ego.
• The delusional is no longer marginal.
• News is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity.
• I like what I do and keep thinking the best is yet to come.
• War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.
• When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind.
• How can those of us who are parents help our children recognize their bliss?
• I can't speak for a war that I believe is immoral.
• [Martin Luther] King subpoened the nation's conscience. He was killed for it.

Bill Moyers Quotes About Life

I really believe that coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous. — Bill Moyers

Although our interests as citizens vary, each one is an artery to the heart that pumps life through the body politic, and each is important to the health of democracy. — Bill Moyers

A journalist is basically a chronicler, not an interpreter of events. Where else in society do you have the license to eavesdrop on so many different conversations as you have in journalism? Where else can you delve into the life of our times? — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers Quotes About Democracy

The quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

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

Democracy belongs to those who exercise it. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

Democracy works when people claim it as their own — Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers Quotes About Feel

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. — Bill Moyers

What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma - the science of the heart...the capacity to see, to feel, and then to act as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does. — 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. — Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers Famous Quotes And Sayings

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

Charity is commendable; everyone should be charitable. But justice aims to create a social order in which, if individuals choose not to be charitable, people still don't go hungry, unschooled or sick without care. Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

If you think there is freedom of the press in the United States, I tell you there is no freedom of the press... They come out with the cheap shot. The press should be ashamed of itself. They should come to both sides of the issue and hear both sides and let the American people make up their minds — Bill Moyers

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." — Bill Moyers

Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel; historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition. — Bill Moyers

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! — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

There's hardly a more bitter pill to take than when a President disappoints the people who most believed in him. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

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

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. — Bill Moyers

You only have to glance at the daily news to see how passions are stirred by claims of exclusive loyalty to one's own kin, one's own clan, one's own country, and one's own church. These ties that bind are vital to our communities and our lives, but they can also be twisted into a noose. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance. Faith-based charity provides crumbs from the table; faith-based justice offers a place at the table. — Bill Moyers

We don't care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

It's the people who are doing the nonviolent organizing at the grassroots that make me think there's still hope. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

Our great progressive struggles have been waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich and privileged, share in the benefits of a free society. — Bill Moyers

Barack Obama strikes me as a man of strong principles and weak convictions - the kind of guy who would rather teach constitutional law than practice it, or who'd rather watch the match alone on TV than arm-wrestle his opponents. — Bill Moyers

Here is the crisis of the times as I see it: We talk about problems, issues, policies, but we don't talk about what democracy means - what it bestows on us - the revolutionary idea that it isn't just about the means of governance but the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency. — Bill Moyers

Lyndon Johnson was thirteen of the most interesting and difficult men I ever met. He could be as couth as he was uncouth, as magnanimous as malicious, at times proud and sensitive, at times paranoid and darkly uneasy with himself. Freud would have had a field day with him. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

Scientists investigate that which already is; Engineers create that which has never been. Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

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

The most fundamental liberal failure of the current era: the failure to embrace a moral vision of America based on the transcendent faith that human beings are more than the sum of their material appetites, our country is more than an economic machine, and freedom is not license but responsibility. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

The most encouraging sign is that 71 percent of the public believe the system is profoundly corrupted by the power of money. Ninety-six percent of the people believe it's "important" that we reduce the influence of money. Yet 91 percent think it's "not likely" that its influence will be lessened. Think about that: People know what's right to do yet don't think it can or will be done. — Bill Moyers

Having lost faith in all else, zealots have nothing left but a holy cause to please a warrior God. They win if we become holy warriors, too; if we kill the innocent as they do; strike first at those who had not struck us; allow our leaders to use the fear of terrorism to make us afraid of the truth; cease to think and reason together, allowing others to tell what's in God's mind. — Bill Moyers

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

Why is the country not having this conversation, the kind of conversation that requires the politicians who are responsible for the war to be specific to the concerns of the American people. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

People who don't believe in government are likely to defy our government. — Bill Moyers

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

Beauty is an expression of that rapture of being alive. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

On the eve of the election last month my wife Judith and I were driving home late in the afternoon and turned on the radio for the traffic and weather. 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. They paraded before us as informed opinion. — Bill Moyers

America is the longest argument in the world. — Bill Moyers

Democracy only works when we claim it as our own. — Bill Moyers

The thing about war is that once it's triggered, it is unyielding in its appetite. And the more it consumes and gorges, the more it wants. — Bill Moyers

It's very difficult to measure the impact on policy of any investigative journalism. You hope it matters to let a little more truth loose in the world, but you can't always be sure it does. You do it because there's a story to be told. I can tell you that the job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is about as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. — Bill Moyers

The things I really cared about - poverty, the Great Society, civil rights - were all being drained away by the Vietnam War. The line that keeps running through my mind is the line I never spoke: "I can't speak for a war that I believe is immoral." — Bill Moyers

The consensual seduction of the mainstream media by and with the government is one of the most dangerous toxins at work in America today. — Bill Moyers

How do we protect the soul of democracy against bad theology in service of an imperial state? — Bill Moyers

Journalism's been a continuing course in adult education for me. — Bill Moyers

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

I've always thought the American eagle needed a left wing and a right wing. The right wing would see to it that economic interests had their legitimate concerns addressed. The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. Both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it's no longer an eagle and it's going to crash. — Bill Moyers

Although I was brought up in a culturally and religious conservative culture, as a Baptist I was taught that no one has the right to subpoena your conscience. — Bill Moyers

I'm angry at what's happening to America and angry with myself that I can't do more. I would be miserable if I couldn't bear witness. — Bill Moyers

The Interfaith Alliance has to become an ongoing sustaining and powerful movement whose interest is to prove that religion has a healing side as well as a killing side, and that democracy is the consequence of conscience — Bill Moyers

Standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country. — Bill Moyers

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" — Bill Moyers

I was not a public - I was not a thinker. I was a doer. — Bill Moyers

I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one — Bill Moyers

There's 1,000 ways into addiction 1,000 ways out. — Bill Moyers

Jon Stewart is a remarkable satirist and parodist in the vein of Mark Twain, because Jon Stewart understands what Mark Twain knew, which is that the truth goes down more easily in a democracy when it's marinated in humor. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

The most important thing the giant philanthropies could do - Gates, Rockefeller, Ford, Open Society Institute, and new ones emerging - would be to create a $2-to-$3 billion Trust for Independent Journalism. They wouldn't miss the money, and democracy would still have a fighting chance because of their investment. — Bill Moyers

A producer is a saboteur who tries to infiltrate the passivity of viewers and to create impressions that are lasting. — Bill Moyers

Big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government. The White House, the Congress and, increasingly, the judiciary, reflect their interests. We appear to have a government run by remote control from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute. To hell with everyone else. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

When the public loses faith in democracy's ability to solve the problems it has created for itself, the game's almost over. And I think we are this close to losing democracy to the mercenary class. — Bill Moyers

Television is a medium. It is neither rare nor well done. — Bill Moyers

In tracking down and eliminating terrorists, we need to change our metaphor from a "war on terror" - exactly what, pray tell, is that? - to the mind-set of Interpol tracking down master criminals through intense global cooperation among nations, or the FBI stalking the Mafia, or local police determined to quell street gangs without leveling the entire neighborhood in the process. — Bill Moyers

I can tell you that the job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is about as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. — Bill Moyers

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. — Bill Moyers

Presidents are afraid to lose wars. They're afraid to be outflanked on the right by the militarists. They don't want to be seen as soft on either communism or soft on terrorism or whatever. So presidents are constantly tugged away from their domestic commitments to foreign policy. — Bill Moyers

When certain causes become prairie fires, politicians make difficult choices, and often at the expense of someone like Jeremiah Wright and Walter Jenkins. That's the cruel nature of American politics, where the end becomes the consummate objective, and sometimes the means to get there come at a great price. — Bill Moyers

Life Lessons by Bill Moyers

1. Bill Moyers teaches us to be mindful of the power of stories and the importance of listening to understand the truth. He encourages us to be open to different perspectives and to be willing to have difficult conversations.
2. He emphasizes the importance of taking action and working together to create positive change in the world. He also encourages us to be mindful of the impact of our words and actions on others.
3. Lastly, Bill Moyers reminds us to be humble, to be honest, and to strive to be the best versions of ourselves. He encourages us to be mindful of our own biases and to strive to be more compassionate and understanding of others.