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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
Reciprocity
Seriously
Build
Civilization
Without
Take
People

More quotes by Bill Moyers

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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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Barack Obama treated too lightly the people and forces determined to destroy him. They spat in his face and didn't even get ticketed for a misdemeanor.
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In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.
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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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Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.
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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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For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.
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Scientists investigate that which already is Engineers create that which has never been. Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.
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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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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.
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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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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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...there is no more effective public interest watchdog in Washington, D.C.
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You can't have a people's democracy as long as corporations are considered people.
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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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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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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
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Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.
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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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Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.
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