Studs Terkel Quotes
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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 want, of course, peace, grace, and beauty. How do you do that? You work for it.
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I'm celebrated for celebrating the uncelebrated.
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Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.
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I call myself a radical conservative. What's that? Well, let's analyze it. Go to the dictionary. Radical: One who gets to the roots of things. And I'm a conservative because I want to conserve the green of the grass, the potability of drinking water, the first amendment of the Constitution and whatever sanity we have left.
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When it comes to the news, the corporate view is `objective,' all else is propaganda.
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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 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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To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.
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Marvin Miller, I suspect, is the most effective union organizer since John L. Lewis.
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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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I always love to quote Albert Einstein because nobody dares contradict him.
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I thought, if ever there were a time to write a book about hope, it's now.
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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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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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I hope that memory is valued - that we do not lose memory.
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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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But once you become active in something, something happens to you. You get excited and suddenly you realize you count.
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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.
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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.
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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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If we're to have a future in the 21st century, we'll want to be able to say, "Now what was the 20th century like in the United States of America, the most powerful of all countries of that century? What was it like to be an ordinary person?"
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Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.