Studs Terkel Quotes (19 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Studs Terkel: 19 quotes1 like

Famous Studs Terkel Quotes

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

“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

Source: Touch and Go: A Memoir

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

Studs Terkel

“Curiosity never killed this cat’ — that’s what I’d like as my epitaph”

Studs Terkel

“I like quoting Einstein. Know why? Because nobody dares contradict you.”

Studs Terkel

The Guardian interview (2002)

“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”

Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel Quotes about thinking

“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

Conversation with Lessing in 1969, quoted in "Doris Lessing comes to town" (15 October 1969) by Roger Ebert http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19691015/PEOPLE/71016002/1023

“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. That's your charge.”

Studs Terkel

David R. Brower, in an interview with Terkel, but much of it is sometimes misattributed to Terkel himself.
Misattributed

“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

The Guardian interview (2002)

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.”

Studs Terkel

“Heroic? I was scared shitless! But my ego was at stake. My vanity. "Whaddya mean, I'm dumb?"”

Studs Terkel

On his blacklisting in 1953
The Guardian interview (2002)
Context: 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?"

“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

The Guardian interview (2002)

“I'm celebrated for celebrating the uncelebrated.”

Studs Terkel

The Guardian interview (2002)

“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

On Nelson Algren, Talking to Myself Bk. 4 (1973)

“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

On seeing a 1956 performance by Billie Holiday, Talking to Myself Bk. 4 (1973) Ch. 4

“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

Regarding his 95th birthday in "Give 'Em Hell, Mr. Terkel" (16 May 2007) by Amy Goodman http://web.archive.org/web/20070613211416/http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/51990

“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

http://books.google.com/books?id=FucDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT25&lpg=PT25&dq=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&source=bl&ots=TYKi7WaW5v&sig=-4ggLp9hfdxXUvrZIF8U1OpGMSU&hl=en&ei=0CPkS4LSJ4P68Aakk7SpBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAcQ6AEwAA Mother Jones Magazine - Sep 1995
The Guardian interview (2002)

“Chicago is not the most corrupt American city, it's the most theatrically corrupt.”

Studs Terkel

The Dick Cavett Show (9 June 1978)

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

Studs Terkel

On breaking his hip, as quoted in "How Studs helps me lead my life" in Roger Ebert's Journal (24 May 2008) http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/05/how_studs_helps_me_lead_my_lif_1.html#more