Daily quote by Bill Moyers

• 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.
  • "Help", speech to the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (3 March 2007), in Moyers on Democracy (2008), p. 99
• [Martin Luther] King subpoened the nation's conscience. He was killed for it.
  • "Help", speech to the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (3 March 2007), in Moyers on Democracy (2008), p. 111
• Terms like "liberty" and "individual freedom" invoked by generations of Americans who battled to widen the 1787 promise to "promote the general welfare" have been perverted to create a government primarily dedicated to the state and the political class that runs it. Yes, Virginia, there is a class war and ordinary people are losing it.
  • Moyers on Democracy (2008), Introduction, p. 2
• 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.
  • Moyers on Democracy (2008), Introduction, p. 3
• People who don't believe in government are likely to defile government.
  • Commenting on the Bush Administration and the Harding Administration in an Interview on Fresh Air (5 November 2008)
• Ed Murrow told his generation of journalists bias is okay as long as you don't try to hide it. So here, one more time, is mine: plutocracy and democracy don't mix. Plutocracy, the rule of the rich, political power controlled by the wealthy.
  Plutocracy is not an American word but it's become an American phenomenon. Back in the fall of 2005, the Wall Street giant Citigroup even coined a variation on it, plutonomy, an economic system where the privileged few make sure the rich get richer with government on their side. By the next spring, Citigroup decided the time had come to publicly "bang the drum on plutonomy." … over the past 30 years the plutocrats, or plutonomists — choose your poison — have used their vastly increased wealth to capture the flag and assure the government does their bidding. … This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom, with little but anxiety and dread in between, as middle class Americans feel the ground falling out from under their feet. … Like those populists of that earlier era, millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable. Then, the remedy was a popular insurgency that ignited the spark of democracy. Now we have come to another parting of the ways, and once again the fate and character of our country are up for grabs. … Democracy only works when we claim it as our own.
  • Last episode of Bill Moyers Journal (30 April 2010) · video
• One of the great reporters of the 20th century, I.F. Stone, told journalism students never to forget that "All governments lie." He could speak with authority, having spent seven decades exposing deception and official lies by digging deep into government documents and transcripts. He gained his greatest fame and impact publishing the newsletter called "I.F. Stone's Weekly," taking on McCarthyism, racism in the military, and the Vietnam War. "In this age of corporation men," he wrote in 1963, "I am an independent capitalist, the owner of my own enterprise." This critically acclaimed documentary, produced in 1973, offered an inside look at how Izzy Stone worked.
  • Bill Moyers talks with alternative media heavyweights Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman about what can and can't be addressed in big corporate media, PBS.org (3 April 2009)
• Historian and activist Howard Zinn died in 2010, and the progressive world greatly misses his spirit and guidance. One wonders what he’d have to say about America today — one in which senators create legislation in secret and a president denigrates foes and allies alike via Twitter. What would he, a former Cub Scout, think about the president’s recent speech in which he exhorted Boy Scouts to boo a previous president? We can be pretty sure that he’d be dismayed and disgusted by an America where CEOs make 271 times the pay of an average worker... He’d certainly be no fan of a culture that made serious, though unsuccessful, attempts to ban his signature work, A People’s History of the United States.
  • What Would Howard Zinn Say? (27 July 2017)