Edward R. Murrow Quotes

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

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

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.

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 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.

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

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

To be credible we must be truthful.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.

A satellite has no conscience.

Good night, and good luck.

Fame is morally neutral.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

All babies look like Winston Churchill.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

We cannot make good news out of bad practice.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.