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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

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Bill Moyers
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: June 5
Former White House Press Secretary
Journalist
Hugo
Oklahoma
Billy Don Moyers
Billy Moyers
Conservatism
Life
Closed
Anger
Less
Fact
Distemper
Pathological
Universe
Militant
Facts
Static
Ideas

More quotes by Bill Moyers

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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.
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Watching the debate this afternoon it was apparent they loved term limits in the House - as Brutus loved Caesar.
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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.
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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.
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War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.
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Standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.
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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.
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You can't have a people's democracy as long as corporations are considered people.
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For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.
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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.
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I really believe that coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.
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Our children are being raised by appliances.
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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.
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Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people.
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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.
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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.
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The fault line in American history is now a dividing line in the election and it's changing the conversation.
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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.
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A producer is a saboteur who tries to infiltrate the passivity of viewers and to create impressions that are lasting.
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We see more and more of our Presidents and know less and less about what they do.
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