Bill Moyers: Governance

“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.”

Bill Moyers

Moyers on Democracy (2008), Introduction, p. 2
Context: 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.

Freedom

“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.”

Bill Moyers

"The Power of Democracy", speech accepting the Public Intellectual Award of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (7 February 2007), as quoted in Moyers on Democracy (2008), p. 92

People , Democracy , Idea , Problem

“Conservatives — or better, pro-corporate apologists — hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like "progress," "opportunity," and "individualism" into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right … This "degenerate and unlovely age," as one historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove — the reputed brain of George W. Bush — as the seminal age of inspiration for politics and governance of America today.”

Bill Moyers

Speech to the "Take Back America" Conference (10 June 2003) http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~wjs/BillMoyersSpeech.htm; "Degenerate and unlovely age" is a quotation from Charles Eliot Norton

Age

“People who don't believe in government are likely to defile government.”

Bill Moyers

Commenting on the Bush Administration and the Harding Administration in an Interview on http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96648963 Fresh Air (5 November 2008)

People

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

Bill Moyers

Speech at the National Conference on Media Reform (15 May 2005) http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0516-34.htm

Country