Work is a search for daily meaning as well as for daily bread.

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.

...changing one's own behavior is a much more promising strategy than insisting on change from the other.

The best music... is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

I'm a little lavish I must admit. But I'm not really concerned with money. Being rich is not my goal, being wealthy is.

Ah, what shall I be at fifty, should nature keep me alive, if I find the world so bitter when I am but twenty-five?

While we live, let us live.

Poetry is when words are robbed of their attributed truth.

I love bikes. I used to own one, but I fell off it when I was younger and that was the end of my bike riding days until now.

Private enterprise did not get us atomic energy.

Like it or not, the people of Arkansas sent me to Washington to represent them in this great body.

I've never lost a grown-up child, but I have known loss.