'Curiosity never killed this cat’ — that’s what I’d like as my epitaph.

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.

Mind what you mind. Do not just open the door of your mind to anything at all you don’t want to mind. Mind the things that get closer to your mind and mind your mind!

Love unconditionally.

The best preparation for a better life next year is a full complete harmonious joyous life this year.

I may be the only mother in America who knows exactly what their child is up to all the time.

It is so comic to hear oneself called old, even at ninety I suppose!

Never spare the parson's wine nor the baker's pudding

Sometimes family members will ask to be kept out of certain things that I'm writing, and I try to respect that. I'd much rather have relatives than a book.

Our constancy, same might call it our madness, was necessary to wear down the oppressive forces of the old democracy which, in Spain, was a hundred years behind the times.

I've always wanted to be a giant space crab.

I just don't think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security.