For the next century, we've got to put together what we so carelessly tore apart with so little concern for those who were gonna follow us. ... You've got to sound off.

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.

Beyond certain age, friends do not come to your life with a design, but they essentially go out of you life for economic reasons. Friends you are left with are your ‘true friends’!

If you keep standing on the verge of greatness, you'll eventually get the courage to leap into it.

Because were human beings, were not always going to be perfect.

I think there is a very quiet power in things that are not on screen

I hear they had our flag on their dressing room floor. I wonder if they'd like us to sign it?

I liked to go to court. I became a lawyer because of the allure of the courtroom, not necessarily to be chained to an office desk.

Religion must be loved as a kind of country and nursing-mother. It was religion that nourished our virtues, that showed us heaven, that taught us to walk in the path of duty.

You know I’m the first rapper to adopt a tabby cat. You know I adopted straight from the ASPCA, you feel me? Just breaking the boundaries, man.

It is necessary to shed old ideas, habits, opinions and even companions sometimes.

If you want something in a deal, just ask for it.