I am paraphrasing Einstein. I love to do that: nobody dares contradict me.

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.

The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

To strive tirelessly and at all times to reach one's goal - therein lies the secret of success.

Ceremonies are no aid to blessedness.

Worriers spend a lot of time shoveling smoke.

I'm a competitor. And I don't want to say, hey, just because this person is a woman or this person is a minority, that they're not going to get the white male vote.

All the discoveries seem to be discoveries of means.

All newspaper writers have heard that the stuff they compose today has an excellent chance of being used to wrap tomorrow's mackerel.

The mind is found most acute and most uneasy in the morning. Uneasiness is, indeed, a species of sagacity - a passive sagacity. Fools are never uneasy.

It was three o'clock in the morning – the wisest and most accursed hour of the clock. But sometimes it sets us free.

If you're first, no one will ever remember. If you're wrong, no one will ever forget.