Edward R. Murrow Quotes on Truth
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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.
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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.
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The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.
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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.
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All I can hope to teach my son is to tell the truth and fear no man.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.
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To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.
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He was a resolute and uncompromising man of truth.