Studs Terkel Quotes
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
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.
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.
I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action, his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It's like a tonic.
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.
But once you become active in something, something happens to you. You get excited and suddenly you realize you count.
The trouble with censorship is that once it starts it is hard to stop. Just about every book contains something that someone objects to.
Work is born in us. We take to it kindly or unkindly. The terms may be easy or harsh, but the contract is binding.
To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.
You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist.
I find labels "liberal" and "conservative" of little meaning. Our language has become perverted along with the thoughts of many of us.
Ordinary' is a word I loathe. It has a patronizing air. I have come across ordinary people who have done extraordinary things.
Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people.
If solace is any sort of succor to someone, that is sufficient. I believe in the faith of people, whatever faith they may have.
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.
The issue is jobs. You can't get away from it: jobs. Having a buck or two in your pocket and feeling like somebody.
I want to praise activists through the years. I praise those of the past as well, to have them honored.
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.
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.
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.
We hear the term independent contractors in Iraq. Independent contractors? Mercenaries!
I'd want the human voice expressing grievances, or delight, or whatever it might be. But something real
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.
