I have a big mouth, and I never met a petition I didn't like, so of course in the McCarthy days I got in trouble.

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.

Our eyes tell us what we want to believe, but our heart tells us only the simple truth

I think everybody gets their recognition sometime down the road, and I have never been one to seek it. Besides, it has been that way throughout my career, especially in college.

The voluntary approach to corporate social responsibility has failed in many cases.

Because mountains are high and broad, the way of riding the clouds is always reached in the mountains; the inconceivable power of soaring in the wind comes freely from the mountains

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Nobody wants to hear me rap.

You can blame people who knock things over in the dark or you can begin to light candles. You're only at fault if you know about the problem and choose to do nothing.

No matter how expected, death is always the ultimate surprise.

I wait till the last minute to do lyrics. I seem to work best that way - bummed out and under pressure. I often don't do my homework. But I'll always walk that extra mile.

Dictators always look good until the last minutes.