"Help, and you will make a huge impact in the life of the street, the town, the country and our planet. If only one out of four of each one hundred of you choose to help on any given day, in any given cause, incredible things will happen in the world you live in."

"As a boy I'd often spend my days biking on riverbeds and arroyos and come home exhausted. I realize now how much I took for granted having the natural world so close at hand. It wasn't until I moved away, first to New York and then to Los Angeles, that I realized how much I missed the outdoors."

"There is something basic about protecting land by taking it off the market. People should be able to enjoy where they live while at the same time protect the plants and animals around them."

"My kid could get a bad X-ray and I could get a call from the doctor saying I have something growing in my bum and that would change my perspective on everything instantaneously, on what is and what is not important."

"I don't know. People always think that there has got to be a dark side to everyone, a closet with skeletons, demons under the bed. People think all kinds of things about one another. They feel compelled to make up fears and false assumptions about their closest friends. Truth is, I'll never know all there is to know about you just as you will never know all there is to know about me. Humans are by nature too complicated to be understood fully. So, we can choose either to approach our fellow human beings with suspicion or to approach them with an open mind, a dash of optimism and a great deal of candour."

"Once humankind has been some place and found it entrancing, they always go back, ... I think in the history of the human race, the moon has been the first place we've gone to and said, 'OK, we don't need to go back there again.'"

"E-mail is far more convenient than the telephone. As far as I'm concerned, I would throw my phone away if I could get away with it."

"If you can feel like a good man in your 40s, you can feel like a better man in your 50s, a Superman in your 60s, and maybe a Spider-Man in your 70s."

"I would not want to live in a country that would have me as a leader in any sort of political bent."

"The year I was born, 1956, was the peak year for babies being born, and there are more people essentially our age than anybody else. We could crush these new generations if we decided to."

"My favorite traditional Christmas movie that I like to watch is All Quiet on the Western Front. It's just not December without that movie in my house."

"My secret to a happy marriage is just being married to the right woman. I got lucky with the wonderful Rita Wilson. I'm the luckiest man alive."

"I won the lotery ! My wife Rita Wilson is the greatest thing that ever happened on the planet Earth. You go through life thinking you know the way to do things. And then you meet somebody who says: 'you don't know anything. You have no social graces, you don't really know how to talk to people or listen to people, you need to learn some things'; and she taught me some great stuff. She made me a 100% man, I was only about 68% until I met my wife."

"That woman has loved me skinny, she's loved me fat. She's love me bald, she's loved me hairy. That woman, I know, loves me. So, I'm a lucky man." - Tom Hanks about his wife, Rita Wilson -

"I’m ludicrously proud of Colin, but I’m not surprised he’s acting. When I saw him in his junior high school plays I knew where he was headed. I saw the talent." - Tom Hanks about his son, Colin -

"He’s better looking than I am, he’s taller than I ever was and he’s hotter than I am - and he’s calmer. I was usually running around looking like (U.S. cartoon character) Gumby on acid." - Tom Hanks about his son, Colin -

"If you have to have a job in this world, a high-priced movie star is a pretty good gig."

"I once interrupted Chrissie Evert from her shower, because I was delivering a bag to her. I learned that celebrities are people just like you and me and they get mad when you take them out of the shower." - Tom Hanks speaking about the period he was a bellman -

"I've made over 20 movies, and 5 of them are good."

"I love what I do for a living, it's the greatest job in the world, but you have to survive an awful lot of attention that you don't truly deserve and you have to live up to your professional responsibilities and I'm always trying to balance that with what is really important."

"My work is magnified by the fact that the streets of heaven are too crowded with angels.We know their names, they number a thousand for each red ribbon we wear here tonight." - Tom Hanks, accepting his Oscar for Philadelphia -

"I must say that I do wrestle with the amount of money I make, but at the end of the day what am I going to say ? I took less money so Rupert Murdoch (an Australian businessman) could have more ?"

"I will entertain anything; it doesn't matter. You know, it's not obviously about the price, it's not about who, it's kind of about when and what. It's material, that's all."

"You know what ? I love movies. I'm lucky to be in a motion picture industry in any capacity. I like nothing better than seeing a good movie and then talking about it afterwards, if you guys feel that way, well it's the highest praise imaginable."

"Movie-making is telling a story with the best technology at your disposal."

"That's what's nice about directing a film and having it done: There's nothing more I can do about it. It's done. That's it. All I can do is let it go and hope that people are kind to it."

"What we're doing with Band of Brothers is trying to put it into human terms, so it is not just a flickering, black and white myth on a screen, it is a resonant story. I want the audience to recognize themselves in these men. They're not just mythic heroes."

"You know, I'm just waiting for the moment when I throw up in the back seat of the limo on my way to a premiere."

"We don't have a host and it's hard to vote yourself off the island when you're the only one on it." - Tom Hanks, about Cast Away -

"We are like an old married couple when we’re working and we always see eye to eye." - Tom Hanks, about Robert Zemeckis -

"There are actors who are very imposing, I don't think I'm that. There are ones who are threatening, I don't think I'm that. There are some who are mysterious, and I don't think I'm that. Maybe I'm just familiar, maybe I'm just a survivor, but I like to assume that I'm also surprising somewhere along the way."

"We set out with 'John Adams' to accomplish really three things. Number one, show a President of the United States and his wife, the First Lady, doing the deed in bed.... We have achieved that goal." - Tom Hanks accepting the TCA Awards for John Adams -

"The prejudice surrounding AIDS exacts a social death which precedes the actual physical one." (Andrew Beckett - Philadelphia)

"Life's like a box of chocolate... you never know what you're gonna get." (Forrest Gump)

"Patricia makes coffee nervous." (Joe Fox - You've Got Mail)

"All my life I've been waiting for someone, and when I find her she's a fish." (Allen Bauer - Splash)

"Now you start using your head. That’s the lump that’s three feet above your ass! Are you crying? Are you crying?! There's no crying! There's no crying in baseball." (Jimmy Dugan - A League of Their Own)

"If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. It's the hard that makes it great." (Jimmy Dugan - A League Of Their Own)

"I know what I have to do now, I’ve got to keep breathing because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?" (Chuck Noland - Cast Away)

"You know you've reached rock bottom when you're told you have character flaws by a man who hanged his predecessor in a military coup." (Charlie Wilson - Charlie Wilson's War)

"May you live as long as you want and not want as long as you live." (Pep Streebeck - Dragnet)