Studs Terkel Quotes

I am paraphrasing Einstein. I love to do that: nobody dares contradict me.

A guy I interviewed for Hard Times says, "What do I remember about the Great Depression? That I was hungry, that's all." Elemental things.

Cannot Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' be subject to transposition: the evil of banality?

I want a language that speaks the truth.

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

Marvin Miller, I suspect, is the most effective union organizer since John L. Lewis.

'Curiosity never killed this cat’ — that’s what I’d like as my epitaph.

I hope that memory is valued - that we do not lose memory.

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.

I'm celebrated for celebrating the uncelebrated.

So how are things going along? Pretty good. Going to be good tomorrow? Hope so.

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.

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.

I cannot even picture myself retiring. What would I do? I'll always be doing something, asking somebody questions, even if there weren't a book.

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.

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.

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.