Studs Terkel Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

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

Studs Terkel
You can work next to a guy for months without even knowing his name.

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

Studs Terkel
Ordinary' is a word I loathe. It has a patronizing air. I have come across ordinary people who have done extraordinary things.

Studs Terkel
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
I was walking downstairs carrying a drink in one hand and a book in the other. Don't try that after ninety.

Studs Terkel
Chicago is not the most corrupt American city, it's the most theatrically corrupt.

Studs Terkel
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.

Studs Terkel
I like quoting Einstein. Know why? Because nobody dares contradict you.

Studs Terkel
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
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
Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up.

Studs Terkel
Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not for long, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.

Studs Terkel
A man comes from New York. He says, "These petitions, your name is on all of them: anti-poll tax, anti-lynching, friendship with the Soviet Union.... don't you know the communists were behind them?" And he said, "Look, you can get out of this pretty easy. All you got to do is say the communists duped you. You were dumb. You didn't mean it." I said, "But I did mean it!" To this day people say, "Oh, Studs, you were so heroic." Heroic? I was scared shitless! But my ego was at stake. My vanity. "Whaddya mean, I'm dumb?"

Studs Terkel
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
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.

Studs Terkel
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
The key 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
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
Doris Lessing: We simply have no idea of Chicago … We never think of you as being on a lake, or of the city being beautiful. We think about the gangsters. You do still have gangsters, don't you?
Terkel: Yes, but these days they're mostly in business, or politics.

Studs Terkel
Being neither a sociologist nor a research man, motivational or otherwise, I followed no blueprint or book of set statistics. I played hunches—in some instances, long shots. Irvin Cobb observed, 'All horse players must die broke.' Here is one who will die astonished.

Studs Terkel
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
To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.

Studs Terkel
For the first book, I interviewed one mother of four little kids, skinny, pretty, bad teeth — meaning no dental care — and the kids are jumping around, 'cause they want to hear their mamma's voice played back... and so I play it back, and she listens to what she said on the tape and she says, 'Oh my God,' she says. ' I never knew I felt that way before' … That's pretty hot stuff, isn't it? That's hot stuff. That's the stuff.

Studs Terkel
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
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
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