Top 100 Studs Terkel Quotes
#1. I don't know if I'm partisan to the underdog or whether I'm the underdog.
Studs Terkel
#2. Reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.
Studs Terkel
#3. The poor are so busy trying to survive from one day to the next, they haven't the time or energy to keep score.
Studs Terkel
#4. Most people were raised to think they are not worthy. School is a process of taking beautiful kids who are filled with life and beating them into happy slavery. That's as true of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year executive as it is for the poorest.
Bill Talcott - Organizer
Studs Terkel
#5. Don't be an examiner, be the interested inquirer.
Studs Terkel
#6. Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not forlong, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.
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#7. You can work next to a guy for months without even knowing his name.
Studs Terkel
#8. Nonetheless, do I have respect for people who believe in the hereafter? Of course I do. I might add, perhaps even a touch of envy too, because of the solace.
Studs Terkel
#9. We are the most powerful nation in the world, but we're not the only nation in the world. We are not the only people in the world. We are an important people, the wealthiest, the most powerful and, to a great extent, generous. But we are part of the world.
Studs Terkel
#10. Think of what's stored in an 80- or a 90-year-old mind. Just marvel at it. You've got to get out this information, this knowledge, because you've got something to pass on. There'll be nobody like you ever again. Make the most of every molecule you've got as long as you've got a second to go.
Studs Terkel
#11. More and more we are into communications; and less and less into communication.
Studs Terkel
#12. Never go to bed with someone whose problems are greater than yours.
Studs Terkel
#13. All you need in life is truth and beauty and you can find both at the Public Library.
Studs Terkel
#14. The Grand Illusion, one of the great war films of all time.
Studs Terkel
#15. Tom Paine was a great American visionary. His book, Common Sense, sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in a population of four or five million. That means it was a best seller for years. People were thoughtful then. Hope is one thing. But you need to have hope with thought.
Studs Terkel
#16. I began to see how everything was so wrong. When growers can have an intricate watering system to irrigate their crops but they can't have running water inside the houses of workers.
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#17. Religion obviously played a role in this book and the previous book, too.
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#18. I always love to quote Albert Einstein because nobody dares contradict him.
Studs Terkel
#19. Work is born in us. We take to it kindly or unkindly. The terms may be easy or harsh, but the contract is binding.
Studs Terkel
#20. The total cost of the Federal Arts Project was only $23 million. Many of these paintings, sculptures and prints were given to museums, courthouses, public buildings. . .. I think that today those in museums alone are worth about $100 million.
Studs Terkel
#21. Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.
Studs Terkel
#22. I am paraphrasing Einstein. I love to do that: nobody dares contradict me.
Studs Terkel
#23. Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.
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#24. My doctors were of one mind: unless something was immediately done, I had maybe six months to live. A quintuple bypass was suggested. Quintuple! I was impressed, though somewhat disturbed because I was in the middle of work on a new book.
Studs Terkel
#25. So people are ready. I feel hopeful in that sense.
Studs Terkel
#26. I thought, if ever there were a time to write a book about hope, it's now.
Studs Terkel
#27. I'm celebrated for celebrating the uncelebrated.
Studs Terkel
#28. Dorothy Day said - and I'm sure that Kathy Kelly would say the same thing - 'I'm working toward a world in which it will be easier for people to behave decently.' Now, think about that: a world in which it will be easier for people to behave decently.
Studs Terkel
#30. I want to praise activists through the years. I praise those of the past as well, to have them honored.
Studs Terkel
#31. I'm called an oral historian, which is something of a joke. Oral history was here long before the pen, long before Gutenberg and the printing press. The difference is I have a tape recorder in my hand.
Studs Terkel
#32. Why are we born? We're born eventually to die, of course. But what happens between the time we're born and we die? We're born to live. One is a realist if one hopes.
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#33. Because a book is a life, like one man is a life.
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#34. If there is knowledge, it lies in the fusion of the book and the street.
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#35. I don't see where people get all this bull about the kid who's gonna be President and being a newsboy made a President out of him. It taught him how to handle his money and this bull. You know what it did? It taught him how to hate the people on his route. And the printers. And dogs.
Studs Terkel
#36. I find labels "liberal" and "conservative" of little meaning. Our language has become perverted along with the thoughts of many of us.
Studs Terkel
#37. When you become part of something, in some way you count. It could be a march; it could be a rally, even a brief one. You're part of something, and you suddenly realize you count. To count is very important.
Studs Terkel
#38. We have two Governments in Washington: one run by the elected people - which is a minor part - and one run by the moneyed interests, which control everything.
Studs Terkel
#39. Curiosity never killed this cat' - that's what I'd like as my epitaph
Studs Terkel
#40. On the evening bus, the tense, pinched faces of young file clerks and elderly secretaries tell us more than we care to know. On the expressways, middle management men pose without grace behind their wheels as they flee city and job.
Studs Terkel
#41. 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.
Studs Terkel
#42. The issue is jobs. You can't get away from it: jobs. Having a buck or two in your pocket and feeling like somebody.
Studs Terkel
#44. Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt.
Studs Terkel
#45. I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly-line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people.
Studs Terkel
#46. It was an exciting community, where we lived in Washington. The basic feeling - and I don't think this is just nostalgia - was one of excitement, of achievement, of happiness. Life was important, life was significant.
Studs Terkel
#47. In order for us, black and white, to disenthrall ourselves from the harshest slavemaster, racism, we must disinter our buried history ... We are all the Pilgrim, setting out on this journey.
Studs Terkel
#48. 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.
Studs Terkel
#49. One of the definitive works on gay life. Through this collective testimony we may come to understand what it is to be 'the other'; in short, the other part of ourselves.
Studs Terkel
#50. The worst day-to-day operators of businesses are bankers.
Studs Terkel
#51. Smug respectability, like the poor, we've had with us always. Today, however, ... such obtuseness is an indulgence we can no longer afford. The computer, nuclear energy for better or worse, and sudden, simultaneous influences upon everyone's TV screen have raised the ante and the risk considerably.
Studs Terkel
#52. Chicago is not the most corrupt of cities. The state of New Jersey has a couple. Need we mention Nevada? Chicago, though, is the Big Daddy. Not more corrupt, just more theatrical, more colorful in its shadiness.
Studs Terkel
#53. If solace is any sort of succor to someone, that is sufficient. I believe in the faith of people, whatever faith they may have.
Studs Terkel
#54. The whole program of unemployment insurance, Social Security, was a confession of the failure of our whole social order. And confession of failure of Christian principles: that man, in fact, did not look after his brother.
Studs Terkel
#55. Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.
Studs Terkel
#56. 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.
Studs Terkel
#57. It is still the arena of those who dream of the City of Man and those who envision a City of Things. The battle appears to be forever joined. The armies, ignorant and enlightened, clash by day as well as night. Chicago is America's dream, writ large. And flamboyantly.
Studs Terkel
#58. Cannot Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' be subject to transposition: the evil of banality?
Studs Terkel
#59. I want, of course, peace, grace, and beauty. How do you do that? You work for it.
Studs Terkel
#60. For the next century, we've got to put together what we so carelessly tore apart with so little concern for those who were gonna follow us ... You've got to sound off.
Studs Terkel
#61. You know, 'power corrupts, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely?' It's the same with powerlessness.
Absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely. Einstein
said everything had changed since the atom was split,
except the way we think. We have to think anew.
Studs Terkel
#62. What's it like to be that goofy little soldier, scared stiff, with his bayonet aimed at Christ? What's it like to have been a woman in a defense-plant job during World War II? What's it like to be a kid at the front lines? It's all funny and tragic at the same time
Studs Terkel
#63. Once you wake up the human animal, you can't put it back to sleep again.
Studs Terkel
#64. All the other books ask, 'What's it like?' What was World War II like for the young kid at Normandy, or what is work like for a woman having a job for the first time in her life? What's it like to be black or white?
Studs Terkel
#65. We hear the term independent contractors in Iraq. Independent contractors? Mercenaries!
Studs Terkel
#66. I presumably lost $150,000 in the depression of 1937 - on my one stock investment - because I did everything Lehman Brothers told me. I said, well, this is a fool's procedure ... buying stock in other people's businesses.
Studs Terkel
#67. People are ready to say, 'Yes, we are ready for single-payer health insurance.' We are the only industrialized country in the world that does not have national health insurance. We are the richest in wealth and the poorest in health of all the industrial nations.
Studs Terkel
#68. People who were personally concerned about a better world, came to Washington, were drawn to it. Even though where we were going was still to be worked out. There was an elan, an optimism . . . an evangelism . . . it was an adventure.
Studs Terkel
#69. I have a big mouth, and I never met a petition I didn't like, so of course in the McCarthy days I got in trouble.
Studs Terkel
#70. Marvin Miller, I suspect, is the most effective union organizer since John L. Lewis.
Studs Terkel
#71. 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.
Studs Terkel
#72. I can't imagine a job where you go home and maybe go by a year later and you don't know what you've done. My work, I can see what I did the first day I started. All my work is set right out there in the open and I can look at it as I go by. It's something I can see the rest of my life.
Studs Terkel
#73. I was born in the year the Titanic sank. The Titanic went down, and I came up. That tells you a little about the fairness of life.
Studs Terkel
#74. I said, "Suppose communists come out against cancer, do we have to automatically come out for cancer?'" I can't take back that I'm against the poll tax, that I'm against lynching, that I'm for peace.
Studs Terkel
#75. Work is a search for daily meaning
as well as for daily bread.
Studs Terkel
#76. You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist.
Studs Terkel
#77. When I put the plate down, you don't hear a sound. When I pick up a glass, I want it to be just right. When someone says, "How come you're just a waitress?" I say, "Don't you think you deserve being served by me?"
Studs Terkel
#78. They say all people who lived under Hitler were bad because they fought the war with him. That is wrong. We can't say all people were bad. We must find out why they were with him. If you want to make something better, you must know the reasons why it was wrong and what has happened. My
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#79. The answer is to say 'No!' to authority when authority is wrong.
Studs Terkel
#80. At a time when pimpery, lick-spittlery, and picking the public's pocket are the order of the day - indeed, officially proclaimed as virtue - the poet must play the madcap to keep his balance. And ours.
Studs Terkel
#81. Having been blacklisted from working in television during the McCarthy era, I know the harm of government using private corporations to intrude into the lives of innocent Americans. When government uses the telephone companies to create massive databases of all our phone calls it has gone too far.
Studs Terkel
#82. I'm not up on the Internet, but I hear that is a democratic possibility. People can connect with each other. I think people are ready for something, but there is no leadership to offer it to them. People are ready to say, 'Yes, we are part of a world.'
Studs Terkel
#83. 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.
Studs Terkel
#84. 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.
Studs Terkel
#85. Though we labor with our minds, this place we can relax in was built by someone who can work with his hands. And his work is as noble as ours. I think the poet owes something to the guy who builds the cabin for him.
Studs Terkel
#86. What I remember most of those times is that poverty creates desperation, and desperation creates violence.
Studs Terkel
#87. That's what we're missing. We're missing argument. We're missing debate. We're missing colloquy. We're missing all sorts of things. Instead, we're accepting.
Studs Terkel
#88. A man? If I need a man, wouldn't you think I'd have one of my own? Must I wait for you?
Studs Terkel
#89. So, my credo consists of the pursuit and the act. One without the other is self-indulgence.
Studs Terkel
#90. You should have seen the things they were giving babies instead of milk. I remember seeing them put salt-pork gravy in milk bottles and putting a nipple on, and the baby sucking this salt-pork gravy. A real blue baby, dying of starvation. In house after house, I saw that sort of thing.
Studs Terkel
#91. My epitaph? My epitaph will be, 'Curiosity did not kill this cat.
Studs Terkel
#92. I'm sure that in Germany people also took an oath of secrecy. We know what that eventually led to. If it works that way with us, the sanctions for breaking the secrecy are nothing compared to the sanctions there could be if we're silent. All
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#93. Taking life seriously requires taking death seriously.
Studs Terkel
#94. We use the word 'hope' perhaps more often than any other word in the vocabulary: 'I hope it's a nice day.' 'Hopefully, you're doing well.' 'So how are things going along? Pretty good. Going to be good tomorrow? Hope so.'
Studs Terkel
#95. 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
Studs Terkel
#96. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.
Studs Terkel
#97. I hope for peace and sanity - it's the same thing.
Studs Terkel
#98. I'm not a Luddite completely; I believe in refrigerators to cool my martinis, and washing machines because I hate to see women smacking their laundry against a rock. When I hear about hardware, I think of pots and pans, and when I hear about software, I think of sheets and towels.
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#99. I hope that memory is valued - that we do not lose memory.
Studs Terkel
#100. There are nascent stirrings in the neighborhood and in the field, articulated by non-celebrated people who bespeak the dreams of their fellows. It may be catching. Unfortunately, it is not covered on the six o'clock news.
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