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.
Rather than ennobling the public mind and cementing the social fabric, applied science speedily became the chief weapon of a gross individualism, which was anathema to the frugal and righteous (John Quincy) Adams, the source of enormous fortunes divorced from duty, the instrument of unscrupulous ambition and rapacious materialism. Presently, it came to scar the very of the country which Adams loved, a disfiguring process uninterrupted since his day.
To each individual the world will take on a different connotation of meaning-the important lies in the desire to search for an answer.
God reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists.
Imaginative truth is the most immediate way of presenting ultimate reality to a human being... ultimate reality is what we call God.
The nonconformist here may be "beat down" by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind.
The future is always present, as a promise, a lure and a temptation.
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