Bill Moyers Quotes

My issue with campaign finance is 100 percent disclosure. Wear a suit with patches from your big contributors. Depending on the size of the contribution, that's how big the patch should be.

All things obey money.

While boasting of our noble deeds we’re careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.

Money does all things,--for it gives and it takes away; it makes honest men and knaves, fools and philosophers; and so forward, mutatis mutandis, to the end of the chapter.

Whoever owns the means of credit controls the industrial life of the nation.

It is campaign money that calls the tune, a fact recognized by every politician within a few minutes after getting into politics.

People who think the might in Washington can be persuaded, or corrupted if you will, by anything less than voters just doesn’t understand what its about and never will. They don’t know what Washington juice is made of.

Those who have lobbyists are more likely to get what they want …. Those who have more money [to spend on lobbying] are more likely to prevail.

If you put enough money on the table, Congress will respond to the money.

We cannot but resent, that forty thousand people should be impoverished to enrich little more than forty merchants.

Large sums of money really unbalance the democratic process.

A nation creates itself not just with what it remembers, but with what it forgets.

Much of the money raised in politics does not come free of charge.

It's obscene how money is driving politics.

On Capitol Hill money doesn't talk. It bellows.

What we call Monopoly is Business at the end of its journey. The concentration of wealth, the wiping out of the middle classes, are other names for it. To get it is, in the world of affairs, the chief end of man.

If not checked the power of money will soon control the elections of the President, the senators and the members of the House of representatives.

... corporate power ... is not only economic—the ability to set prices without regard to market pressures or to manipulate consumer demand. It is also political—the ability to use the public government to obtain private economic goals. Corporate power means the ability of big corporations to have more than their fair share of influence over the decisions of government.

One party is under the ironclad control of Wall Street and the other one caters to Wall Street.

…wealth’s influence on civic elections is still more pernicious. Money is frequently the most forcible logic, and he that carries the longest purse, will often carry the most votes.

There will be more [political] scandals. There is too much money around …. It is legal for an American subsidiary corporation owned by the Chinese Army to make a major contribution to an American political party.

I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hand the destiny of the people

Money plays the largest part in determining the course of history.

Politicians don’t have a spine any more. They pander to whoever will give them money

The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson — and I am not wholly excepting the Administration of Woodrow Wilson. The country is going through a repetition of Jackson's fight with the Bank of the United States — only on a far bigger and broader basis.