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.

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.

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.

I want, of course, peace, grace, and beauty. How do you do that? You work for it.

Those who are truly grateful are deeply moved by the privilege of living.

Insanity has infected all the central banks of the world.

It's the courage to stay with something long enough to succeed at it.

It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.

There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies

I don't purchase records. I do enjoy listening to things like Japanese folk music or Indian music.

before the gate -- my walking stick's made a river of melting snow

I grew up very introverted and I'm still a very introverted person, so to me it's about constantly just pushing and pushing out of your comfort zone because that where you're going to grow the most.

We can fight the War on Terrorism in other places around the world or we can fight it here in America. The right choice is to fight those terrorists where they are.

My worst haircuts have been the ones where I've done my own.