Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt.

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.

Love is the only thing we can carry with us when we go and it makes the end so easy.

The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another.

The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor.

Some people are born skinny, and that's just the way it is. You can't point a finger at them and say they're ill or anorexic. It isn't fair to people born that way.

The thing about Republicans is that they don't care so much about respect, but they love fear, at least in others.

Parking at a garage is like going to a prostitute. Why pay for it when you can apply yourself, and then may be you can get it for free.

Last Friday night; Yeah we danced on tabletops. And we took too many shots. Think we kissed, but I forgot?

Even if you didn't come to meet me, I'm just going to like you.

The fact that a thirteen-year-old project still resonates and can still have a large exhibit with lots of newspaper, magazine and TV press shows the timelessness of the project.

Inflation could be a very - is a likely consequence out of what's going on now.