Studs Terkel Short Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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