Top 100 Studs Terkel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Don’t be an examiner, be the interested inquirer.”

— Studs Terkel

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

— Studs Terkel

4. “An agnostic is a cowardly atheist.”

— Studs Terkel

5. “I hope for peace and sanity – it’s the same thing.”

— Studs Terkel

6. “The answer is to say ‘No!’ to authority when authority is wrong.”

— Studs Terkel

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

— Studs Terkel

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

— Studs Terkel

9. “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.”

— Studs Terkel

10. “I find labels “liberal” and “conservative” of little meaning. Our language has become perverted along with the thoughts of many of us.”

— Studs Terkel

11. “Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.”

— Studs Terkel

12. “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.”

— Studs Terkel

13. “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

14. “Cannot Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ be subject to transposition: the evil of banality?”

— Studs Terkel

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

— Studs Terkel

16. “I thought, if ever there were a time to write a book about hope, it’s now.”

— Studs Terkel

17. “All you need in life is truth and beauty and you can find both at the Public Library.”

— Studs Terkel

18. “I’m not a Luddite completely; I believe in refrigerators to cool my martinis, and washing machines because I hate to see women smacking their laundry against a rock. When I hear about hardware, I think of pots and pans, and when I hear about software, I think of sheets and towels.”

— Studs Terkel

19. “When it comes to the news, the corporate view is ‘objective,’ all else is propaganda.”

— Studs Terkel

20. “The 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

21. “Work is born in us. We take to it kindly or unkindly. The terms may be easy or harsh, but the contract is binding.”

— Studs Terkel

22. “I’m not an optimist. I’m hopeful.”

— Studs Terkel

23. “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

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

— Studs Terkel

25. “I’m called an oral historian, which is something of a joke. Oral history was here long before the pen, long before Gutenberg and the printing press. The difference is I have a tape recorder in my hand.”

— Studs Terkel

26. “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.’”

— Studs Terkel

27. “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.”

— Studs Terkel

28. “Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It’s the most theatrically corrupt.”

— Studs Terkel

29. “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

30. “Reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.”

— Studs Terkel

31. “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread.”

— Studs Terkel

32. “I’m celebrated for celebrating the uncelebrated.”

— Studs Terkel

33. “When I put the plate down, you don’t hear a sound. When I pick up a glass, I want it to be just right. When someone says, “How come you’re just a waitress?” I say, “Don’t you think you deserve being served by me?””

— Studs Terkel

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

— Studs Terkel

35. “On the evening bus, the tense, pinched faces of young file clerks and elderly secretaries tell us more than we care to know. On the expressways, middle management men pose without grace behind their wheels as they flee city and job.”

— Studs Terkel

36. “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.”

— Studs Terkel

37. “I began to see how everything was so wrong. When growers can have an intricate watering system to irrigate their crops but they can’t have running water inside the houses of workers.”

— Studs Terkel

38. “It is about a search, too, 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. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.”

— Studs Terkel

39. “Working in the fields is not in itself a degrading job. It’s hard, but if you’re given regular hours, better pay, decent housing, unemployment and medical compensation, pension plans – we have a very relaxed way of living. But the growers don’t recognize us as persons. That’s the worst thing, the way they treat you. Like we have no brains. Now we see they have no brains. They have only a wallet in their head. The more you squeeze it, the more they cry out.”

— Studs Terkel

40. “Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell.”

— Studs Terkel

41. “Taking life seriously requires taking death seriously.”

— Studs Terkel

42. “I said, “Suppose communists come out against cancer, do we have to automatically come out for cancer?‘” I can’t take back that I’m against the poll tax, that I’m against lynching, that I’m for peace.”

— Studs Terkel

43. “Though we labor with our minds, this place we can relax in was built by someone who can work with his hands. And his work is as noble as ours. I think the poet owes something to the guy who builds the cabin for him.”

— Studs Terkel

44. “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

45. “I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly-line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people.”

— Studs Terkel

46. “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.”

— Studs Terkel

47. “Marvin Miller, I suspect, is the most effective union organizer since John L. Lewis.”

— Studs Terkel

48. “But once you become active in something, something happens to you. You get excited and suddenly you realize you count.”

— Studs Terkel

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

— Studs Terkel

50. “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.”

— Studs Terkel