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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.

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
Humans
Beings
Rekindle
Fight
Guthrie
Blood
Patriot
Democracy
Calls
Fighting
Begins
Doesn
Flesh
Dream
Bottom
Human
Begin

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When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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We don't care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings.
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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.
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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.
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Journalism's been a continuing course in adult education for me.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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