Ordinary' is a word I loathe. It has a patronizing air. I have come across ordinary people who have done extraordinary things.

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 don't write, then read.

When you have to made a decision, there's no return, keep this in your mind.

Audiences like to see the bad guys get their comeuppance.

A formal and orderly conception of the whole is rarely present, perhaps even rarely possible, except to a few men of exceptional genius.

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

I have a vision of artists putting into film, drama, literature, music, and paintings great themes and great characters from the Book of Mormon.

Success goes to those who dare to dream. And sometimes you have to take a little "scary action," as well.

You're worth something because God says you're worth something-not because of what people think or say about you.

Sometimes you've gotta wreck the truck to get the insurance money to make the payment on the truck.

I think our love can do anything we want it to.