Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Edward R. Murrow
Edward R. Murrow Quotes
51 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. 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.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words. If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
In the area of politics our major policy obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
If we go on as we are, we are protecting the mind of the American public from any real contact with the menacing world that squeezes in upon us. We are engaged in a great experiment to discover whether a free public opinion can devise and direct methods of managing the affairs of the nation. We may fail. But we are handicapping ourselves needlessly.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
This just might do nobody any good. At the end of this discourse a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest, and your organization may be accused of having given hospitality to heretical and even dangerous thoughts. But the elaborate structure of networks, advertising agencies and sponsors will not be shaken or altered. It is my desire, if not my duty, to try to talk to you journeymen with some candor about what is happening to radio and television.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
... if what I say is responsible, I alone am responsible for the saying of it...
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
This reporter's beliefs are in a state of flux. It would be easier to enumerate the items I do not believe in, than the other way around. And yet in talking to people, in listening to them, I have come to realize that I don't have a monopoly on the world's problems. Others have their share, often far bigger than mine. This has helped me to see my own in truer perspective: and in learning how others have faced their problems — this has given me fresh ideas about how to tackle mine.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
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.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
Perhaps we should warn you that there is one thing you won't read, and that is a pat answer for the problems of life. We don't pretend to make this a spiritual or psychological patent-medicine chest where one can come and get a pill of wisdom, to be swallowed like an aspirin, to banish the headaches of our times.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
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.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
Future generations who bother to read the official record of proceedings in the House of Commons will discover that British armies retreated from many places, but that there was no retreat from the principles for which your ancestors fought.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
This I Believe — by that name, we present the personal philosophies of thoughtful men and women in all walks of life. In this brief space, a banker or a butcher, a painter or a social worker, people of all kinds who need have nothing more in common than integrity, a real honesty, will write about the rules they live by, the things they have found to be the basic values in their lives.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
All I can hope to teach my son is to tell the truth and fear no man.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
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. The top management of the networks with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. But by the nature of the corporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs. Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do this.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
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.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
During the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW AND PAY LATER.
For surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must be faced if we are to survive. I mean the word survive literally.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
I have no technical advice or counsel to offer those of you who labor in this vineyard, the one that produces words and pictures. You will, I am sure, forgive me for not telling you that instruments with which you work are miraculous, that your responsibility is unprecedented or that your aspirations are frequently frustrated. It is not necessary to remind you of the fact that your voice, amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other, does not confer upon you greater wisdom than when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other. All of these things you know.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
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.
Edward R. Murrow
Source
Report...
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.
Edward R. Murrow
1
2
Quote of the day
The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.
John Philpot Curran
Edward R. Murrow
Creative Commons
Born:
April 25, 1908
Died:
April 27, 1965
(aged 57)
Bio:
Edward R. Murrow was an American broadcast journalist.
Known for:
See It Now (1951 – 1958)
Person to Person (1953 – 1961)
Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
The Lost Class of '59
Small World
Most used words:
television
men
fear
public
networks
radio
advertising
people
country
news
live
speak
read
business
beliefs
Edward R. Murrow on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Edward R. Murrow Quotes
Edward R. Murrow Short Quotes
Quotes about Edward R. Murrow
American Journalist Quotes
Journalist Quotes
20th-century Journalist Quotes
Related Authors
Walter Cronkite
American Journalist
Joseph McCarthy
American Politician
Fred W. Friendly
American Broadcaster
Dan Rather
American Journalist
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes