Top 60 Bill Moyers Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Bill Moyers

2. “When a library is open, no matter its size or shape, democracy is open, too.”

— Bill Moyers

3. “Scientists investigate that which already is; Engineers create that which has never been. Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.”

— Bill Moyers

4. “Charity provides crumbs from the table; justice offers a place at the table.”

— Bill Moyers

5. “Democracy belongs to those who exercise it.”

— Bill Moyers

6. “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.”

— Bill Moyers

7. “Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow.”

— Bill Moyers

8. “Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.”

— Bill Moyers

9. “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.”

— Bill Moyers

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

— Bill Moyers

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

— Bill Moyers

12. “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.”

— Bill Moyers

13. “The delusional is no longer marginal.”

— Bill Moyers

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

— Bill Moyers

15. “I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.”

— Bill Moyers

16. “Standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.”

— Bill Moyers

17. “Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.”

— Bill Moyers

18. “I own and operate a ferocious ego.”

— Bill Moyers

19. “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.”

— Bill Moyers

20. “There’s 1,000 ways into addiction 1,000 ways out.”

— Bill Moyers

21. “When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind.”

— Bill Moyers

22. “The quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined.”

— Bill Moyers

23. “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.”

— Bill Moyers

24. “News is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity.”

— Bill Moyers

25. “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

26. “America is the longest argument in the world.”

— Bill Moyers

27. “When language fails, violence becomes a language.”

— Bill Moyers

28. “As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I’ve thought everyone is a teacher.”

— Bill Moyers

29. “Our media and political system has turned into a mutual protection racket.”

— Bill Moyers

30. “We now know that a neo-conservative is an arsonist who sets the house on fire and six years later boasts that no one can put it out.”

— Bill Moyers

31. “Television can stir emotions, but it doesn’t invite reflection as much as the printed page.”

— Bill Moyers

32. “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.”

— Bill Moyers

33. “Beauty is an expression of that rapture of being alive.”

— Bill Moyers

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

— Bill Moyers

35. “Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel; historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition.”

— Bill Moyers

36. “Empty your knapsack of all adjectives, adverbs and clauses that slo your stride and weaken your pace. Travel light. Remember the most memorable sentences in the English language are also the shortest: “The King is dead” and “Jesus wept.””

— Bill Moyers

37. “We have got to nurture the spirit of independent journalism in this country, or we’ll not save capitalism from its own excesses, and we’ll not save democracy from its own inertia.”

— Bill Moyers

38. “Our children are being raised by appliances.”

— Bill Moyers

39. “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.”

— Bill Moyers

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

— Bill Moyers

41. “Democracy works when people claim it as their own.”

— Bill Moyers

42. “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.”

— Bill Moyers

43. “We see more and more of our Presidents and know less and less about what they do.”

— Bill Moyers

44. “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.”

— Bill Moyers

45. “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.”

— Bill Moyers

46. “Watching the debate this afternoon it was apparent they loved term limits in the House – as Brutus loved Caesar.”

— Bill Moyers

47. “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.”

— Bill Moyers

48. “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.”

— Bill Moyers

49. “There are honest journalists like there are honest politicians – they stay bought.”

— Bill Moyers

50. “You can’t have a people’s democracy as long as corporations are considered people.”

— Bill Moyers