Studs Terkel Quotes

I don’t think we’re basically a revolutionary country. We have too large a middle class. The middle class tends to be apathetic. An apathetic middle class gives stability to a system. They never get carried away strongly, one way or the other. Maybe we’ll have riots, maybe we’ll have shootings. Maybe we’ll have uprisings as the farmers did in Iowa. But you won’t have revolution.

In memory, we find the most complete release from the narrowness of presented time and place.... The picture is one of human beings confronted by a world in which they can be masters only as they ... discover ways of escape from the complete sway of immediate circumstances. — F. C. Bartlett, Remembering

We’re in bad shape as a country. We’re suffering from the collapse of both political parties. They’re bought out. They’re owned by corporate America, lock, stock, and barrel. The media is sold out. The corporate dominant culture, which is driven by the market, the bottom line, sells out everything.

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

I don’t know what I’d like to do. That’s what hurts the most. That’s why I can’t quit the job. I really don’t know what talents I may have. And I don’t know where to go to find out. I’ve been fostered so long by school and didn’t have time to think about it. My father’s in watch repair. That’s always interested me, working with my hands, and independent. I don’t think I’d mind going back and learning something, taking a piece of furniture and refinishing it. The type of thing where you know what you’re doing and you can create and you can fix something to make it function. At the switchboard you don’t do much of anything.

I'm celebrated for celebrating the uncelebrated.

You should have seen the things they were giving babies instead of milk. I remember seeing them put salt-pork gravy in milk bottles and putting a nipple on, and the baby sucking this salt-pork gravy. A real blue baby, dying of starvation. In house after house, I saw that sort of thing.

So, my credo consists of the pursuit and the act. One without the other is self-indulgence.

Everybody's entitled to that forty acres and a mule. You're going to do the work, but you have to have something to work with. If you don't have a job, where do you go from there? You hear people say Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you don't even have shoes. You're barefooted. What are you going to pull yourself up by? Our country owes every citizen of the United States of America a means of livelihood. Not a handout, but a way to make it.

Chicago is not the most corrupt of cities. The state of New Jersey has a couple. Need we mention Nevada? Chicago, though, is the Big Daddy. Not more corrupt, just more theatrical, more colorful in its shadiness.

My mom had always wanted me to better myself. I wanted to better myself because of her. Now when the strikes started, I told her I was going to join the union and the whole movement. I told her I was going to work without pay. She said she was proud of me. (His eyes glisten. A long, long pause.) See, I told her I wanted to be with my people. If I were a company man, nobody would like me any more. I had to belong to somebody and this was it right here. She said, “I pushed you in your early years to try to better yourself and get a social position. But I see that’s not the answer. I know I’ll be proud of you.

There was none of this hatred you see now when strange people come to town, or strangers come to a neighborhood. They resent it, I don’t know why. That’s one of the things about the Depression. There was more camaraderie than there is now. Even more comradeship than the Commies could even dream about. That was one of the feelings that America lost. People had different ideas, they disagreed with one another. But there was a fine feeling among them. You were in trouble . . . damn it, if they could help ya, they would help ya.

Freud put it one way. Ralph Helstein puts it another. He is president emeritus of the United Packinghouse Workers of America. “Learning is work. Caring for children is work. Community action is work. Once we accept the concept of work as something meaningful — not just as the source of a buck — you don’t have to worry about finding enough jobs. There’s no excuse for mules any more. Society does not need them. There’s no question about our ability to feed and clothe and house everybody. The problem is going to come in finding enough ways for man to keep occupied, so he’s in touch with reality.” Our imaginations have obviously not yet been challenged.

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.

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