Studs Terkel Quotes
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When it comes to the news, the corporate view is `objective,' all else is propaganda.
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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.
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I suppose if I have an epitaph it would be: "Curiosity Did Not Kill This Cat." I don't see retiring in the sense that we view it - I don't see how I could. Dying at the microphone or at the typewriter would not be bad.
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I'm celebrated for celebrating the uncelebrated.
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To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.
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Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.
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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.
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More and more we are into communications; and less and less into communication.
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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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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.
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I hope that memory is valued - that we do not lose memory.
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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.
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I hope for peace and sanity - it's the same thing.
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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.
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I want, of course, peace, grace, and beauty. How do you do that? You work for it.
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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.
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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.
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But once you become active in something, something happens to you. You get excited and suddenly you realize you count.
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Marvin Miller, I suspect, is the most effective union organizer since John L. Lewis.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Religion obviously played a role in this book and the previous book, too.
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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.