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

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
Take
People
Reciprocity
Seriously
Build
Civilization
Without

More quotes by Bill Moyers

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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 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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition.
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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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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.
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How do we protect the soul of democracy against bad theology in service of an imperial state?
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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.
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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.
Bill Moyers
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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.
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Democracy only works when we claim it as our own.
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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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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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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.
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