We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
Interpretation
True freedom must be upheld not just in other lands but in our own society as well.
Edward R. Murrow's quote emphasizes the importance of maintaining and defending our own freedoms and rights domestically before we can advocate for freedom in other countries. It highlights the irony and hypocrisy of promoting liberty abroad while neglecting it at home, suggesting that genuine commitment to freedom should start within our own borders.
In practice
During a discussion on civil rights, this quote can illustrate the importance of protecting freedoms at home.
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.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
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.
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 this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.
No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.
The idea that there is one kind of African is of course ridiculous. Sometimes African entrepreneurs want to kill you because you are saying public health is the priority, not roads. Of course they are right to press for that issue, but so are we right, I believe, to argue for example that millions of children could and should be vaccinated.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
If a man be endowed with a generous mind, this is the best kind of nobility.
To consider this desirable would be to delight in the slaughter of men; and he who delights in the slaughter of men cannot get his will in the kingdom.
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