Bill Moyers

“This is the first time in my 32 years in public broadcasting that PBS has ordered up programs for ideological instead of journalistic reasons.”

“Constitutional democracy, you see, is no romantic notion. It's our defense against ourselves, the one foe who might defeat us.”

“When I learn something new - and it happens every day - I feel a little more at home in this universe, a little more comfortable in the nest.”

“Today, the practice of medicine in an urban, technological society rarely provides either the time or the environment to encourage a doctor-patient relationship that promotes healing.”

“Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people.”

“War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.”

“America's corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they're privatizing democracy. All the benefits - the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up.”

“For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.”

“We don't care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings.”

“Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.”

“When my brother died in 1966, my father began a grieving process that lasted almost twenty-five years. For all that time, he suffered from chronic, debilitating headaches. I took him to some of the country's major medical facilities, but no one could cure him of his pain.”

“Every once in a while, a book so possesses me that I happily give up a couple of consecutive nights of sleep - as well as the evening news broadcasts and latenight talk shows - to finish it. That's what happened when I opened the novel 'Shadow Tag' by Louise Erdrich.”

“In marriage, everyday you love,and everyday you forgive.It is an ongoing sacrament, love and forgiveness”

“Someone asked why I invited Jon Stewart to be the first guest on the 'Journal''s premiere in 2007. 'Because Mark Twain isn't available,' I answered. I was serious.”

“Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.”

“Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.”

“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.”

“I work for him despite his faults and he lets me work for him despite my deficiencies.”

“Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.”

“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.”