I was born in the year the Titanic sank. The Titanic went down, and I came up. That tells you a little about the fairness of life.

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.

You are the light of love in darkness. I am longing for you, oh my love!

In a matter of moments, I awakened to a life that wasn’t mine. It was like peering into a dark hidden world that I wasn’t supposed to know about and that my mind didn’t want to believe existed.

Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.

There was no sign of any life, just erratic hints of a faded sun peeking down with sorrow on the dead world it once nourished.

I make it a rule always to believe compliments implicitly for five minutes, and to simmer gently for twenty more.

I do what I do because there's nothing else I can do.

Muslim citizens should never be classified according to their creed, origin, ancestry or culture. After all, I don't define my political or social position by reference to the Christian faith.

Whatever shift is necessary is dependent on the scale on which it can be implemented, which is to say in your local community and family.

Life is like a snowball. The important thing is finding wet snow and a really long hill.