Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
Interpretation
Our personal experiences shape our perceptions, and we must acknowledge our biases rather than try to ignore them.
In this quote, Edward R. Murrow emphasizes the idea that every individual is shaped by their unique experiences, which in turn creates biases and prejudices. Recognizing these biases is crucial because while we may not be able to eliminate them entirely, awareness allows us to approach situations and others with a more open mind, leading to better understanding and empathy.
In practice
During a workshop on diversity, this quote can remind participants to acknowledge their own biases.
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.
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.
Speaking of Sir Winston Churchill: He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
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.
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.
If you are serious about your religion, if you really wish to commit yourself to the spiritual quest, you must learn how to use psychochemicals. Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first_x000D_ century. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D., and besides_x000D_ telescopes are unnatural.
...any belief in supernatural creators, rulers, or influencers of natural or human process introduces an irreparable split into the universe, and prevents us from grasping its real unity. Any belief in Absolutes, whether the absolute validity of moral commandments, of authority of revelation, of inner certitudes, or of divine inspiration, erects a formidable barrier against progress and the responsibility of improvement, moral, rational, and religious.
It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.
The Tao teaches us not to intervene and interfere. The things we love we have to learn to leave alone. And the people we love we have to learn to let them be.
The trouble with these people is that their cities have never been bombed and their mothers have never been told to shut up.
Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.
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