Your voice, amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other, does not confer upon you greater wisdom than when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other.
Interpretation
The extent of your audience does not determine the value of your insights.
Edward R. Murrow's quote emphasizes that having a larger platform or audience does not inherently mean that one's ideas or opinions are more insightful or wise. It suggests that true wisdom is independent of how far one's voice can reach and instead resides in the depth and quality of what is being communicated.
In practice
In a speech about the impact of social media, one could use this quote to illustrate the idea that popularity does not equal wisdom.
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.
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.
We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
Perhaps when the light of heaven shows us clearly the pitfalls and dangers of the earth road that led to the heavenly city, our sweetest songs of gratitude will be not for the troubles we have conquered, but for those we have escaped.
it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
I've spent my life trying to make things simpler. Because I find ultimately that complicated doesn't reach the heart.
When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.
There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.
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