interesting quotes from Edward R. Murrow: "A nation of sheep"

• A nation of sheep begets a government of wolves.

 

• A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.

• A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There's nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I've done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom — it's gone.

• Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.

• Fame is morally neutral.

• He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.
  • On Sir Winston Churchill (Churchill, Volume V, p. 346)

• I have always been on the side of the heretics against those who burned them because the heretics so often turned out to be right. Dead, but right.

• Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.

• Language is one of the greatest gifts man has devised for himself. It ranks, alongside the discovery of fire and the wheel, as a major influence in making modern man what he is today.

• Language is the memory of man. Without it he has no past, a paltry present, and an empty future. With it he can bring his dreams to life.

• Learn your language well and command it well, and you will have the first component to life.

• Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.

• No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.

• Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.

• People say conversation is a lost art; how often I have wished it were.

• The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.

• The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

• The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.

• To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.

• We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.
  • Variant: Dissension is not disloyalty. These remarks are similar to the sourced remarks of 9 March 1954 above.

• When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.

• A nation of sheep begets a government of wolves.