It’s very important you learn people as people are. Anybody can go around and write a book about a person, but that book doesn’t always tell you that… - Studs Terkel

In the meantime, I would work in the relief office and I began interviewing people . . . and found out how everybody, in order to be eligible for relief, had to have reached absolute bottom. You didn’t have to have a lot of brains to realize that once they reached that stage and you put them on an allowance of a dollar a day for food — how could they ever pull out of it?

"Most people were raised to think they are not worthy. School is a process of taking beautiful kids who are filled with life and beating them into happy slavery. That's as true of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year executive as it is for the poorest."
Bill Talcott - Organizer

The poor are so busy trying to survive from one day to the next, they haven’t the time or energy to keep score.