Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Bill Moyers
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: June 5
Former White House Press Secretary
Journalist
Hugo
Oklahoma
Billy Don Moyers
Billy Moyers
Wealth
Chose
Expressly
Force
Imagined
Facto
Father
Fathers
Framers
Federal
Veneration
Property
Exclude
Constitution
Demonstrating
Office
Qualifications
Higher
Founding
Unseemly

More quotes by Bill Moyers

Image
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
Image
The fault line in American history is now a dividing line in the election and it's changing the conversation.
Bill Moyers
Image
Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.
Bill Moyers
Image
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
Image
When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind.
Bill Moyers
Image
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
Image
[Martin Luther] King subpoened the nation's conscience. He was killed for it.
Bill Moyers
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.
Bill Moyers
Image
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
Image
We don't care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings.
Bill Moyers
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I like what I do and keep thinking the best is yet to come.
Bill Moyers
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There's hardly a more bitter pill to take than when a President disappoints the people who most believed in him.
Bill Moyers