Studs Terkel
I hope for peace and sanity - it's the same thing.Collection: Peace
With optimism, you look upon the sunny side of things. People say, 'Studs, you're an optimist.' I never said I was an optimist. I have hope because what's the alternative to hope? Despair? If you have despair, you might as well put your head in the oven.Collection: Hope
I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence - providing they have the facts, providing they have the information.Collection: Intelligence
I'm not up on the Internet, but I hear that is a democratic possibility. People can connect with each other. I think people are ready for something, but there is no leadership to offer it to them. People are ready to say, 'Yes, we are part of a world.'Collection: Leadership
When you become part of something, in some way you count. It could be a march; it could be a rally, even a brief one. You're part of something, and you suddenly realize you count. To count is very important.
Someone who does an act. In a democratic society, you're supposed to be an activist; that is, you participate. It could be a letter written to an editor.
I want to praise activists through the years. I praise those of the past as well, to have them honored.
If solace is any sort of succor to someone, that is sufficient. I believe in the faith of people, whatever faith they may have.
I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be.
Why are we born? 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.
We use the word 'hope' perhaps more often than any other word in the vocabulary: 'I hope it's a nice day.' 'Hopefully, you're doing well.' 'So how are things going along? Pretty good. Going to be good tomorrow? Hope so.'
That's why I wrote this book: to show how these people can imbue us with hope. 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.
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.
Nonetheless, do I have respect for people who believe in the hereafter? Of course I do. I might add, perhaps even a touch of envy too, because of the solace.
So people are ready. I feel hopeful in that sense.
Religion obviously played a role in this book and the previous book, too.
I want a language that speaks the truth.
Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt.
I always love to quote Albert Einstein because nobody dares contradict him.
All the other books ask, 'What's it like?' What was World War II like for the young kid at Normandy, or what is work like for a woman having a job for the first time in her life? What's it like to be black or white?
I thought, if ever there were a time to write a book about hope, it's now.
But once you become active in something, something happens to you. You get excited and suddenly you realize you count.
I hope that memory is valued - that we do not lose memory.
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.
I want, of course, peace, grace, and beauty. How do you do that? You work for it.
That's what we're missing. We're missing argument. We're missing debate. We're missing colloquy. We're missing all sorts of things. Instead, we're accepting.
We are the most powerful nation in the world, but we're not the only nation in the world. We are not the only people in the world. We are an important people, the wealthiest, the most powerful and, to a great extent, generous. But we are part of the world.
You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist.
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.Collection: Friday
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'.Collection: 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.Collection: Country
Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Knowledge
Ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things, and that's what it's all about. They must count.Collection: People
If there is knowledge, it lies in the fusion of the book and the street.Collection: Lying
Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.Collection: Spring
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.Collection: Work
More and more we are into communications; and less and less into communication.Collection: Communication
The answer is to say 'No!' to authority when authority is wrong.Collection: Answers
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.Collection: Drinking
My epitaph? My epitaph will be, 'Curiosity did not kill this cat'.Collection: Cat
Don't be an examiner, be the interested inquirer.Collection: Inquirers
Never go to bed with someone whose problems are greater than yours.Collection: Bed
The trouble with censorship is that once it starts it is hard to stop. Just about every book contains something that someone objects to.Collection: Book
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.Collection: People
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 TerkelCollection: People
Reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.Collection: Book
To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.Collection: Survival
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.Collection: Phones