Studs Terkel Quotes

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.

Heroes are not giant statues framed against a red sky. They are people who say: This is my community, and it is my responsibility to make it better. Interweave all these communities and you really have an America that is back on its feet again. I really think we are gonna have to reassess what constitutes a 'hero'.

We are living in the United States of Alzheimer's. A whole country has lost its memory. When it can't remember yesterday, a country forgets what it once wanted to be.

If there is knowledge, it lies in the fusion of the book and the street.

Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.

Think of what's stored in an 80- or a 90-year-old mind. Just marvel at it. You've got to get out this information, this knowledge, because you've got something to pass on. There'll be nobody like you ever again. Make the most of every molecule you've got as long as you've got a second to go.

Ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things, and that's what it's all about. They must count.

I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be.

Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.

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.

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.

More and more we are into communications; and less and less into communication.

The answer is to say 'No!' to authority when authority is wrong.

The trouble with censorship is that once it starts it is hard to stop. Just about every book contains something that someone objects to.

My epitaph? My epitaph will be, 'Curiosity did not kill this cat'.

Work is a search for daily meaning as well as for daily bread.

Never go to bed with someone whose problems are greater than yours.

Don't be an examiner, be the interested inquirer.

When I was asked: "Will shame do it?" Meaning: Will welfare people be shamed into getting respectable work? And I said that shame plays the biggest role there is: The biggest shame is that there is so much abundance around but that so many have so little and so few have so much. That's the shame.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel

You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist.

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

Having been blacklisted from working in television during the McCarthy era, I know the harm of government using private corporations to intrude into the lives of innocent Americans. When government uses the telephone companies to create massive databases of all our phone calls it has gone too far.

I want, of course, peace, grace, and beauty. How do you do that? You work for it.

I always love to quote Albert Einstein because nobody dares contradict him.