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We Have To Face The Unpleasant As Well As The Affirmative Side Of The Human Story, Including Our Own Story As A Nation, Our Own Stories Of Our Peoples. We Have Got To Have The Ugly Facts In Order To Protect Us From The Official View Of Reality. Otherwise, We Are Squeezed Empty And Filled With What Other People Want Us To Think And Feel And Experience.

-Bill Moyers

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We Have To Face

Bill Moyers

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We Have To Face The Unpleasant As Well As The Affirmative Side Of The Human Story, Including Our Own Story As A Nation, Our Own Stories Of Our Peoples. We Have Got To Have The Ugly Facts In Order To Protect Us From The Official View Of Reality. Otherwise, We Are Squeezed Empty And Filled With What Other People Want Us To Think And Feel And Experience.

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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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Difficult Choices

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Our Media And Political System Has Turned Into A Mutual Protection Racket.

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The Delusional Is No Longer Marginal.

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There Are Honest Journalists Like There Are Honest Politicians - They Stay Bought.

Jon Stewart Is A Remarkable Satirist And Parodist In The Vein Of Mark Twain, Because Jon Stewart Understands What Mark Twain Knew, Which Is That The Truth Goes Down More Easily In A Democracy When It's Marinated In Humor.

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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.

I Can Tell You That The Job Of Trying To Tell The Truth About People Whose Job It Is To Hide The Truth Is About As Complicated And Difficult As Trying To Hide It In The First Place.

I Really Believe That Coincidence Is God's Way Of Remaining Anonymous.

The Struggle Of Ordinary People For A Decent Living, For Security, Is As Old As The Republic, But It's Taken On A New And Urgent Edge. Instead Of Shared Prosperity Our Political System Has Now Produced A Winner-take-all Economy.

For The First Time In Our History, Ideology And Theology Hold A Monopoly Of Power In Washington.

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.

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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War, Except In Self-defense, Is A Failure Of Moral Imagination.

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People Who Don't Believe In Government Are Likely To Defy Our Government.

It's The People Who Are Doing The Nonviolent Organizing At The Grassroots That Make Me Think There's Still Hope.

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.

I Have Seen Hate Born Of Fear, Hate Speaking In The Name Of God And Truth, Hate Holding Up A Distorting Mirror To Fellow Human Beings.

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.

We See More And More Of Our Presidents And Know Less And Less About What They Do.

Scientists Investigate That Which Already Is; Engineers Create That Which Has Never Been. Creativity Is Piercing The Mundane To Find The Marvelous.

The Thing About War Is That Once It's Triggered, It Is Unyielding In Its Appetite. And The More It Consumes And Gorges, The More It Wants.

But There Is Nothing Idealized Or Romantic About The Difference Between A Society Whose Arrangements Roughly Serve All Its Citizens (something Otherwise Known As Social Justice) And One Whose Institutions Have Been Converted Into A Stupendous Fraud. That Can Be The Difference Between Democracy And Plutocracy.

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.

Secrecy Is The Freedom Tyrants Dream Of.

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I Like What I Do And Keep Thinking The Best Is Yet To Come.

Best Is Yet To Come

When All Our Efforts Have Come To Nothing, We Naturally Tend To Doubt Not Just Ourselves, But Also Whether God Is Just. At Those Moments, Our Only Hope Is To Seek Every Evidence That God Is Just, By Communing With The People We Know Who Are Strongest In Faith.

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Lyndon Johnson Was Thirteen Of The Most Interesting And Difficult Men I Ever Met. He Could Be As Couth As He Was Uncouth, As Magnanimous As Malicious, At Times Proud And Sensitive, At Times Paranoid And Darkly Uneasy With Himself. Freud Would Have Had A Field Day With Him.

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.

Distribution Of Wealth

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There Is A Historic Strain Of Dominion Theology Which Says, Taking Its References From The Psalms, That Man Is Made Just A Little Lower Than God, And That We Are The Crown Of Creation. That Interpretation Has Come At The Expense Of The One That Says When God, In The Story Of Noah, Intervened To Save Human Life Against The Flood, Against The Acts Of Nature, He Did Not Stop With Human Beings. He Made Sure That Every Kind Of Animal Was Represented Twice On That Ark.

The Interfaith Alliance Has To Become An Ongoing Sustaining And Powerful Movement Whose Interest Is To Prove That Religion Has A Healing Side As Well As A Killing Side, And That Democracy Is The Consequence Of Conscience

Our Economy Is A Plantation Run For The Aristocrats - The Ceos, Hedge Funds, Private Equity Firms - While The Field Hands Are Left With The Scraps.

When We Were Covering The 2008 Campaign I Told My Young African American Colleagues That Despite The Historical Significance Of Victory, Barack Obama Was Going To Break Their Hearts. They Didn't Want To Hear That, And They Refused To Believe It. Eighteen Months Later They Started Dropping By One By One To Say, Sadly: "he Broke Our Hearts." A Couple Of Them Even Wept.

An Unconscious People, An Indoctrinated People, A People Fed Only Partisan Information And Opinion That Confirm Their Own Bias, A People Made Morbidly Obese In Mind And Spirit By The Junk Food Of Propaganda Is Less Inclined To Put Up A Fight, Ask Questions And Be Skeptical. And Just As A Democracy Can Die Of Too Many Lies, That Kind Of Orthodoxy Can Kill Us, Too.

When Ideology And Theology Couple, Their Offspring Are Not Always Bad But They Are Always Blind.

On The Eve Of The Election Last Month My Wife Judith And I Were Driving Home Late In The Afternoon And Turned On The Radio For The Traffic And Weather. What We Instantly Got Was A Freak Show Of Political Pornography: Lies, Distortions, And Half-truths - Half-truths Being Perhaps The Blackest Of All Lies. They Paraded Before Us As Informed Opinion.

Our Very Lives Depend On The Ethics Of Strangers, And Most Of Us Are Always Strangers To Other People.

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.

Revolutionary Ideas

Journalism's Been A Continuing Course In Adult Education For Me.

[martin Luther] King Subpoened The Nation's Conscience. He Was Killed For It.

Reagan's Story Of Freedom Superficially Alludes To The Founding Fathers, But Its Substance Comes From The Gilded Age, Devised By Apologists For The Robber Barons. It Is Posed Abstractly As The Freedom Of The Individual From Government Control A Jeffersonian Ideal At The Roots Of Our Bill Of Rights, To Be Sure. But What It Meant In Politics A Century Later, And Still Means Today, Is The Freedom To Accumulate Wealth Without Social Or Democratic Responsibilities And License To Buy The Political System Right Out From Everyone Else.

As A Student I Learned From Wonderful Teachers And Ever Since Then I've Thought Everyone Is A Teacher.

In Marriage, Everyday You Love,and Everyday You Forgive.it Is An Ongoing Sacrament, Love And Forgiveness

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You Can't Have A People's Democracy As Long As Corporations Are Considered People.

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I Own And Operate A Ferocious Ego.

A Producer Is A Saboteur Who Tries To Infiltrate The Passivity Of Viewers And To Create Impressions That Are Lasting.

Democracy Works When People Claim It As Their Own

If You Think There Is Freedom Of The Press In The United States, I Tell You There Is No Freedom Of The Press... They Come Out With The Cheap Shot. The Press Should Be Ashamed Of Itself. They Should Come To Both Sides Of The Issue And Hear Both Sides And Let The American People Make Up Their Minds

If Being Tolerant Of Differing Opinions, If Believing That America Has To Make It As A Pluralistic Nation, If Being Civil, If That Makes You A Liberal, I Plead Guilty.

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.

I'm The Front Man, I'm The Man On Camera, But There's A Whole Team Beyond Me.

I Can't Speak For A War That I Believe Is Immoral.

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.

Standing Up To Your Government Can Mean Standing Up For Your Country.

Our Children Are Being Raised By Appliances.

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.

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