Edward R. Murrow

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.

— Edward R. Murrow

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.

— Edward R. Murrow

Do not be deluded into believing that the titular heads of the networks control what appears on their networks. They all have better taste. All are responsible to stockholders, and in my experience all are honorable men. But they must schedule what they can sell in the public market.

— Edward R. Murrow

Fame is morally neutral.

— Edward R. Murrow

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

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

— Edward R. Murrow

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

— Edward R. Murrow

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.

— Edward R. Murrow

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

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

— Edward R. Murrow

We are to a large extent an imitative society.

— Edward R. Murrow

Good night, and good luck.

— Edward R. Murrow

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.

— Edward R. Murrow

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

— Edward R. Murrow

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.

— Edward R. Murrow

Senator McCarthy's reckless and unfounded attempt to impugn my loyalty is just one more example of his typical tactic of attempting to tie up to Communism anyone who disagrees with him.

— Edward R. Murrow

A satellite has no conscience.

— Edward R. Murrow

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

We cannot make good news out of bad practice.

— Edward R. Murrow

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.

— Edward R. Murrow

I have an old-fashioned belief that Americans like to make up their own minds on the basis of all available information.

— Edward R. Murrow

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

— Edward R. Murrow

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.

— Edward R. Murrow

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

— Edward R. Murrow

We cannot make good news out of bad practice.

— Edward R. Murrow

Good night, and good luck.

— Edward R. Murrow

This program is not a place where personal opinion should be mixed up with ascertainable facts...It is not, I think, humanly possible for any reporter to be completely objective, for we are all to some degree prisoners of our education, travel, reading—the sum total of our experience.

— Edward R. Murrow

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.

— Edward R. Murrow

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

— Edward R. Murrow

He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.

— Edward R. Murrow

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

— Edward R. Murrow

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.

— Edward R. Murrow

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

After last night's debate, the reputation of Messieurs Lincoln and Douglas is secure.

— Edward R. Murrow

Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.

— Edward R. Murrow

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.

— Edward R. Murrow

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

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.

— Edward R. Murrow

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.

— Edward R. Murrow

We cannot make good news out of bad practice.

— Edward R. Murrow

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

— Edward R. Murrow

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

— Edward R. Murrow

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

— Edward R. Murrow

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

— Edward R. Murrow

As I walked down to the end of the barracks, there was applause from the men too weak to get out of bed. It sounded like the hand clapping of babies; they were so weak.

— Edward R. Murrow

We went to the hospital; it was full. The doctor told me that two hundred had died the day before. I asked the cause of death; he shrugged and said, "Tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue, and there are many who have no desire to live."

— Edward R. Murrow

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

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

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

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.

— Edward R. Murrow

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.

— Edward R. Murrow

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.

— Edward R. Murrow

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

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

— Edward R. Murrow

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

— Edward R. Murrow

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 just the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants.

— Edward R. Murrow

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

— Edward R. Murrow

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

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

— Edward R. Murrow

Last week, Senator McCarthy appeared on this program to correct any errors he might have thought we made in our report of March ninth. Since he made no reference to any statements of fact that we made, we must conclude that he found no errors of fact. He proved again, that anyone who exposes him, anyone who does not share his hysterical disregard for decency and human dignity and the rights guaranteed by the Constitution, must be either a Communist or a 'fellow traveler'.

— Edward R. Murrow

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

— Edward R. Murrow

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

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

— Edward R. Murrow

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.

— Edward R. Murrow

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.

— Edward R. Murrow

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 perhaps color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.

— Edward R. Murrow

Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.

— Edward R. Murrow

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

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

— Edward R. Murrow

I have reason to know, as do many of you, that when the evidence on a controversial subject is fairly and calmly presented, the public recognizes it for what it is--an effort to illuminate rather than to agitate.

— Edward R. Murrow

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

— Edward R. Murrow

If radio news is to be regarded as a commodity, only acceptable when saleable, and only when packaged to fit the advertising appropriation of a sponsor, then I don't care what you call it — I say it isn't news.

— Edward R. Murrow

If you believe that this war will be decided on the home front, then you must believe that radio used as an instrument of war is one of the most powerful weapons a nation possesses.

— Edward R. Murrow

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

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

— Edward R. Murrow