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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

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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
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More quotes by Bill Moyers

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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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For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.
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Journalism's been a continuing course in adult education for me.
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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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War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.
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There's 1,000 ways into addiction 1,000 ways out.
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Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.
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I take We, the People seriously because I don't know how we build a civilization without reciprocity.
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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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The Supreme Court consistently favors organized money and the political privileges of the corporate class. We have a Senate that is more responsive to affluent constituents than to middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of income distribution have no apparent effect at all on the Senate's roll call votes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In those days [1955], affirmative action was for whites only. I might still be working for the grocery store in the small Texas town where I grew up were it not for affirmative action for Southern white boys.
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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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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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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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