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.
Humans arose ... as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness.
No man can attain to the knowledge of God but by humility. The way to mount high is to descend.
Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.
We are constantly railing against the passions; we ascribe to them all of man's afflictions, and we forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures.
The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we've learned most of what we know. Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
Truth does not belong to an individual.
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