I think it's realistic to have hope. One can be a perverse idealist and say the easiest thing: 'I despair. The world's no good.' That's a perverse idealist. It's practical to hope, because the hope is for us to survive as a human species. That's very realistic.

I never drove a car. I'm hopeless that way. I press the wrong buttons on the tape recorder. But if the person I'm interviewing helps me out, that person feels needed. People need to feel needed.

If we're to have a future in the 21st century, we'll want to be able to say, "Now what was the 20th century like in the United States of America, the most powerful of all countries of that century? What was it like to be an ordinary person?"

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

I guess I was seeking some balance in the wildlife of the city as Rachel Carson sought it in nature. In unbalanced times, balance is as difficult to come by as Parsifal's Grail.

One night a guy hit his head on a welding gun. He went to his knees. He was bleeding like a pig, blood was oozing out. So I stopped the line for a second and ran over to help him. The foreman turned the line on again, he almost stepped on the guy. That's the first thing they always do. They didn't even call an ambulance. The guy walked to the medic department -- that's about half a mile -- he had about five stitches put in his head. The foreman didn't say anything. He just turned the line on. You're nothing to any of them.

Ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things, and that's what it's all about. They must count.