Murrow, Edward R. (Edward R. Murrow)

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
-- 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

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices
-- Edward R. Murrow

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 coporate 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

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

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, PAY LATER.
-- Edward R. Murrow

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.

-- Edward R. Murrow

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

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 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.
-- Edward R. Murrow

I have no technical advice or counsel to offer those of you who labor in this vineyard that produces words and pictures. You will 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 that 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. All of these things you know.
-- 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

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

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

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

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

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

We cannot make good news out of bad practice.
-- 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

Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.
-- Edward R. Murrow

A satellite has no conscience.
-- 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

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

If we confuse dissent with disloyalty— if we deny the right of the individual to be wrong, unpopular, eccentric or unorthodox— if we deny the essence of racial equality then hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who are shopping about for a new allegiance will conclude that we are concerned to defend a myth and our present privileged status. Every act that denies or limits the freedom of the individual in this country costs us the ... confidence of men and women who aspire to that freedom and independence of which we speak and for which our ancestors fought.
-- Edward R. Murrow

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.

-- Edward R. Murrow

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

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

-- 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

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

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

-- Edward R. Murrow

Fame is morally neutral.

-- Edward R. Murrow

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.
-- Edward R. Murrow

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

-- Edward R. Murrow

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.
-- Edward R. Murrow

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.
-- Edward R. Murrow

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

-- 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

We are to a large extent an imitative society.
-- Edward R. Murrow

This instrument 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 is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.
-- Edward R. Murrow

Stonewall Jackson, who knew something about the use of weapons, is reported to have said, "When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.
-- Edward R. Murrow

...if what I say is responsible, I alone am responsible for the saying of it...
-- Edward R. Murrow

A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.
-- 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

The sponsor of an hour's television program is not buying merely the six minutes devoted to commercial message. He is determining, within broad limits, the sum total of the impact of the entire hour. If he always, invariably, reaches for the largest possible audience, then this process of insulation, of escape from reality, will continue to be massively financed, and its apologist will continue to make winsome speeches about giving the public what it wants, or "letting the public decide."
-- 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

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

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 the Communications Act which says that they must increase their net profits each year, lest the Republic collapse.
-- 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