Taking life seriously requires taking death seriously.

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.

It's faith that will take you through and determination that will drive you.

Saying "yes" to yourself means acknowledging what you have that's good and working on the things that aren't.

Long-lasting change that will help you create new habits and actions requires an inside-out approach, as well as two very important tools: the mirror and time.

We are destined not to go back to the level of animals that we've come from but to return to being by going beyond thinking.

I feel very protected when I see a movie. That's why I like making violent movies or radical movies.

I fiercely protect my privacy. I just don't think it's everyone's business to know every little detail about my life. That's just the way I've handled myself.

[Never underestimate] the power of dinner.

Remember, having faith means recognizing the value of what you are here to contribute to the world and allowing your actions to be grounded in that truth.

Most Christians salute the sovereignty of God but believe in the sovereignty of man.

There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart; he does not feel for man.