Edward R. Murrow Quotations

If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.

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.

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.

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

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

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

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.

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

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

The politician in my country seeks votes, affection and respect, in that order. With few notable exceptions, they are simply men who want to be loved.

We cannot make good news out of bad practice.

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.

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

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

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.

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

I would like television to produce some itching pills rather than this endless outpouring of tranquilizers..

Fame is morally neutral.

Tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue, and there are many who have no desire to live.

Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice (and those thoughts we aren't interested in), people don't speak their beliefs easily, or publicly.

Of this be wary. Honor and fame are often regarded as interchangeable. Both involve an appraisal of the individual. . . but I suggest this difference. Fame is morally neutral.

I am entirely persuaded that the American public is more reasonable, restrained and mature than most of the broadcast industry's planners believe. Their fear of controversy is not warranted by the evidence.

We will not be driven by fear ... if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men.

All babies look like Winston Churchill.

All I can hope to teach my son is to tell the truth and fear no man.

The politician is . . . trained in the art of inexactitude. His words tend to be blunt or rounded, because if they have a cutting edge they may later return to wound him.

The fact that your voice is amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon you greater wisdom or understanding than you possessed when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other.

Good night, and good luck.

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.

Speaking of Sir Winston Churchill: He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.

We are to a large extent an imitative society.

The only thing that counts is the right to know, to speak, to think - that, and the sanctity of the courts. Otherwise it's not America.

Most of them [American politicians] are men of undoubted charm, ability, and incredible energy, and yet too often they lack purpose or appetite for anything beyond their own careers. With few notable exceptions, they are simply men who want to be loved.

It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation; they had not been executed. But the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last twelve years.

It has always seemed to me the real art in this business is not so much moving information or guidance or policy five or 10,000 miles. That is an electronic problem. The real art is to move it the last three feet in face to face conversation.

Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.

A thing of orchestrated hell-a terrible symphony of light and flame.

In order to progress, radio need only go backward, to the time when singing commercials were not allowed on news reports, when there was no middle commercial on a news report, when radio was rather proud, alert and fast.

The obscure we always see sooner or later; the obvious always seems to take a little longer.

We're not descended from fearful men - not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

It is well to remember that freedom through the press is the thing that comes first. Most of us probably feel we couldn't be free without newspapers, and that is the real reason we want the newspapers to be free.

A satellite has no conscience.

A blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts ... the body language of a man wishing urgently to be elsewhere.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

To be credible we must be truthful.

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.

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.

I was greatly influenced by one of my teachers. She had a zeal not so much for perfection as for steady betterment-she demanded not excellence so much as integrity.

The best speakers know enough to be scared…the only difference between the pros and the novices is that the pros have trained the butterflies to fly in formation.

Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.

Don't be deluded into believing that the titular heads of the networks control what appears on their networks. They all have better taste.

I am frightened by the imbalance, the constant striving to reach the largest possible audience for everything; by the absence of a sustained study of the state of the nation.

I have said, and I believe, that potentially we have in this country a free enterprise system of radio and television which is superior to any other. But to achieve its promise, it must be both free and enterprising. There is no suggestion here that networks or individual stations should operate as philanthropies. But I can find nothing in the Bill of Rights or in the Communications Act which says that they must increase their net profits each year, lest the Republic collapse.

The Wright brothers' first flight was not reported in a single newspaper because every rookie reporter knew what could and couldn't be done.

There is a mental fear, which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor's yard and stampedes us to burn down this house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt, doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we had long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging. It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong.

The real crucial link in the international exchange is the last three feet, which is bridged by personal contact, one person talking to another.

I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage. Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live,

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

This instrument [radio] can teach. It can illuminate, yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it's nothing but wires and lights in a box.

I have no feud, either with my employers, any sponsors, or with the professional critics of radio and television. But I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage.

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another.

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.

We are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks-that's show business.

One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles.

If radio news is to be regarded as a commodity, only acceptable when saleable, then I don't care what you call it - I say it isn't news.

I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument.

We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.

Our history will be what we make of it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge and retribution will not limp in catching up with us. So, just once in a while let us exhault the importance of ideas and information.

If none of us ever read a book that was "dangerous," had a friend who was "different," or joined an organization that advocated "change," we would all be the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants.

We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

American traditions and the American ethic require us to be truthful, but the most important reason is that truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that.

We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men ... We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion - a lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the market place while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply.

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.

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.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.