In order for us, black and white, to disenthrall ourselves from the harshest slavemaster, racism, we must disinter our buried history.... We are all the Pilgrim, setting out on this journey.

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 world was a vale of tears—it always had been.

He (Babe Ruth) was very brave at the plate. You rarely saw him fall away from a pitch. He stayed right in there. No one drove him out.

If he were insane, however, his was a very cool and collected insanity.

The advent of DNA testing, and the number of convictions thrown out, has confirmed that we've put LOTS of innocent people to death. There need not be any other argument against death penalty.

Compromise for your Dream but NEVER Compromise on your Dream.

I do my best to hold the director's opinion above my own.

Are you at work?" I asked. Not precisely, but that's a good suggestion.

With fantasy and sci-fi, it's based in a real fandom. You're presenting to experts, and their source material is really important to them.

A hard man is good to find.

The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes. The only adventure that is doomed from the start is the one we do not attempt.