Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.

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.

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.

I want, of course, peace, grace, and beauty. How do you do that? You work for it.

Only trials can bring you triumph and only obstacles can bring you miracle.

If we don’t know who we are, we’ll never know how we ought to live.

We're not words...we're people. Words are how others define us, but we can define ourselves any way we choose.

To succeed perseverance yells "pain to gain". If you don't take heed, you'll end up slain!

When you want something you've never had, you have to do something you've never done.

Big Ben just kept building up. It ended up coming off the field. It kept taking over. Superman kept taking over Clark Kent and you just never saw who Ben Roethlisberger was any more.

Don't forget that you are the product of a culture that went stark raving mad about ten thousand years ago. Adjust your thinking accordingly.

Take heede of still waters, the quick passe away.

I stayed sober for this?

Ridicule has even been the most powerful enemy of enthusiasm, and properly the only antagonist that can be opposed to it with success.