Once you wake up the human animal, you can't put it back to sleep again.

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.

If you want to do something great, remember someone out there trying already to get that, I want you to be that some one.

Who I am is not the same minute to minute or day to day. There are far too many variables for that to ever be true, for me, or for anyone.

Tennis is mostly mental. Of course, you must have a lot of physical skill, but you can't play tennis well and not be a good thinker. You win or lose the match before you even go out there.

When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief.

To this generation I would say: Memorize some bit of verse of truth or beauty.

Average wages now are still just barely above poverty, and one out of three Americans cannot afford healthcare even with the insurance,with jobs.

To see farther, you must climb higher.

The older I get, the easier it is to just be present in the moment, and understand what a man is going through.

It looked pretty wild, but I was actually in control of myself. I've never really injured anyone throughout my career.

Those particular thoughts that are painful - love them. I love them to death!