Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the value of ideas and information in our lives.
Edward R. Murrow highlights the significance of cherishing and uplifting ideas and information, suggesting that they play a crucial role in shaping society and fostering progress. By encouraging a focus on the importance of knowledge, the quote advocates for a culture where intellectual curiosity and the dissemination of information are celebrated.
In practice
In a speech about the role of media in society, you might quote Murrow to emphasize how vital information is.
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.
In the United States we have concentrated tremendous sums of money on the educational plant, seemingly with the idea that the right number of buildings will turn out the right number of graduates. Yet the teachers who actually instruct the future citizens of our country are more often than not miserably paid. If in the future we find ourselves with a lot of fourth-rate citizens, we have only ourselves to blame.
We can say with some assurance that, although children may be the victims of fate, they will not be the victims of our neglect.
The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role impressed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.
If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day... You don't go to a well once but daily. You don't skip a child's breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning.
I read an hour almost every night. It's part of falling asleep.
I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture. I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black.
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