All you need in life is truth and beauty and you can find both at the Public Library.

How come you don't work fourteen hours a day? Your great-great-grandparents did. How come you only work the eight-hour day? Four guys got hanged fighting for the eight-hour day for you.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel

Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.

Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell.

I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be.

We are living in the United States of Alzheimer's. A whole country has lost its memory. When it can't remember yesterday, a country forgets what it once wanted to be.

Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.

Ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things, and that's what it's all about. They must count.

I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence - providing they have the facts, providing they have the information.

More and more we are into communications; and less and less into communication.

God is a witness to anything done in secret.

When we find successful people in our field, learn from their experience and understand some important things more specifically

Beauty is a sense of harmony.

Expect to wonder to find wonder.

Death is something we shouldn't fear because, while we are, death isn't, and when death is, we aren't.

Our merit gains us the esteem of the virtuous-our star that of the public.

Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one's own.

The wise know too well their weakness to assume infallibility; and he who knows most knows best how little he knows.

The best results are achieved by using the right amount of effort in the right place at the right time. And this right amount is usually less than we think we need.

I think it makes women feel better to find fault with other women. I do that, too.