I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action, his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It's like a tonic.

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.

I think poetry without metaphor is like husband and wife living in separate bedrooms.

She’d die before she let that demon touch her again. But maybe that was his plan all along.

It’s easy to confuse motion with progress.

Let it never surprise true Christians if they are slandered and misrepresented in this world. They must not expect to fare better than their Lord.

I never look at a high point in my career. Everyone thinks about the Spinks fight, but that fight only lasted 91 seconds, so it's hard to say it defined my career.

In physics, opinions don't matter, only demonstrated experiments. The day the fellow succeeds, if ever, he won't need anybody else's opinion.

Magic: The Gathering, Gossamer Phantom. I asked him, 'Do you believe it's real?' He almost started crying and said, 'Yes, I do think it's real' and I said, 'Then that's all that matters.'

Thr principle of organization is built into nature. Chaos itself is self-organizing. Out of primordial disorder, stars find their orbit; rivers make their way to the sea.

I have someone. He's 25. It's nothing serious.

Remember it doesn't take the same minute to make Indomie like it does to make Jollof rice.