Never go to bed with someone whose problems are greater than yours.

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.

One makes his own meanings as the counterfeiter prints his own money: both know full well that the value of either rests solely in the gullibility of its recipient...

I didn't want to feel like I was mimicking or copying someone else's performance, whether it's subconscious or not.

Display is as false as it is costly.

We're only here for one reason: to wake up... To realize yourself doesn't mean you are perfect as a human being. It means you are willing to bear the imperfections and not sell out to them.

Do good, feel good; feel good, do good.

Sometimes the best thing that can happen to a person is to have a puppy lick your face.

Adversity will do something too you or for you.

It's a chore for a fellow to fear for his life more than once in an evening.

Those who have wisdom have all: Fools with all have nothing.

The beauties of conception are always superior to those of expression.