Top 100 Studs Terkel Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I want, of course, peace, grace, and beauty. How do you do that? You work for it.”

— Studs Terkel

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

— Studs Terkel

53. “The overt hustling society is the microcosm of the rest of the society. The power relationships are the same and the games are the same. Only this one I was in control of. The greater one I wasn’t. In the outside society, if I tried to be me, I wasn’t in control of anything. As a bright, assertive woman, I had no power. As a cold, manipulative hustler, I had a lot. I knew I was playing a role. Most women are taught to become what they act. All I did was act out the reality of American womanhood.”

— Studs Terkel

54. “It is still the arena of those who dream of the City of Man and those who envision a City of Things. The battle appears to be forever joined. The armies, ignorant and enlightened, clash by day as well as night. Chicago is America’s dream, writ large. And flamboyantly.”

— Studs Terkel

55. “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.”

— Studs Terkel

56. “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.”

— Studs Terkel

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

— Studs Terkel

58. “I never drove a car. I’m hopeless that way. I press the wrong buttons on the tape recorder. But if the person I’m interviewing helps me out, that person feels needed. People need to feel needed.”

— Studs Terkel

59. “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.”

— Studs Terkel

60. “We hear the term independent contractors in Iraq. Independent contractors? Mercenaries!”

— Studs Terkel

61. “You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist.”

— Studs Terkel

62. “People are hungry for stories. It’s part of our very being.”

— Studs Terkel

63. “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.”

— Studs Terkel

64. “If solace is any sort of succor to someone, that is sufficient. I believe in the faith of people, whatever faith they may have.”

— Studs Terkel

65. “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.”

— Studs Terkel

66. “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

67. “There are nascent stirrings in the neighborhood and in the field, articulated by non-celebrated people who bespeak the dreams of their fellows. It may be catching. Unfortunately, it is not covered on the six o’clock news.”

— Studs Terkel

68. “I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be.”

— Studs Terkel

69. “I guess I was seeking some balance in the wildlife of the city as Rachel Carson sought it in nature. In unbalanced times, balance is as difficult to come by as Parsifal’s Grail.”

— Studs Terkel

70. “They say all people who lived under Hitler were bad because they fought the war with him. That is wrong. We can’t say all people were bad. We must find out why they were with him. If you want to make something better, you must know the reasons why it was wrong and what has happened. My.”

— Studs Terkel

71. “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.”

— Studs Terkel

72. “I’d want the human voice expressing grievances, or delight, or whatever it might be. But something real.”

— Studs Terkel

73. “We sent him to school for him to take this heavy equipment. I worked and cooked over at the school, helped send him there. I said, “I’m not sendin’ you to school to come out here and go to work for these strip mines.” I’d rather see him in Vietnam than see him doin’ strip jobs.”

— Studs Terkel

74. “If they wanted a half-inch, you have to be able to give them a half-inch. I mean, not an inch, not two inches. Those holes must line up exactly or they won’t make their iron. And when you swing, you have to swing real smooth. You can’t have your iron swinging back and forth, oscillating. If you do this, they’ll refuse to work with you, because their life is at stake.”

— Studs Terkel

75. “You can work next to a guy for months without even knowing his name.”

— Studs Terkel

76. “You try to fill up your time with trying to think about other things: what you’re going to do on the weekend or about your family. You have to use your imagination. If you don’t have a very good one and you bore easily, you’re in trouble. Just to fill in time, I write real bad poetry or letters to myself and to other people and never mail them. The letters are fantasies, sort of rambling, how I feel, how depressed I am.”

— Studs Terkel

77. “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.”

— Studs Terkel

78. “Dorothy Day said – and I’m sure that Kathy Kelly would say the same thing – ‘I’m working toward a world in which it will be easier for people to behave decently.’ Now, think about that: a world in which it will be easier for people to behave decently.”

— Studs Terkel

79. “I am paraphrasing Einstein. I love to do that: nobody dares contradict me.”

— Studs Terkel

80. “My doctors were of one mind: unless something was immediately done, I had maybe six months to live. A quintuple bypass was suggested. Quintuple! I was impressed, though somewhat disturbed because I was in the middle of work on a new book.”

— Studs Terkel

81. “If I had enough money, I would take busloads of people out to the fields and into the labor camps. Then they’d know how that fine salad got on their table.”

— Studs Terkel

82. “Once you wake up the human animal, you can’t put it back to sleep again.”

— Studs Terkel

83. “This I remember. Some people put this out of their minds and forget it. I don’t. I don’t want to forget it. I don’t want it to take the best of me, but I want to be there because this is what happened. This is the truth, you know. History.”

— Studs Terkel

84. “I want a language that speaks the truth.”

— Studs Terkel

85. “Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not forlong, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.”

— Studs Terkel

86. “I hope that memory is valued – that we do not lose memory.”

— Studs Terkel

87. “I don’t see where people get all this bull about the kid who’s gonna be President and being a newsboy made a President out of him. It taught him how to handle his money and this bull. You know what it did? It taught him how to hate the people on his route. And the printers. And dogs.”

— Studs Terkel

88. “Religion obviously played a role in this book and the previous book, too.”

— Studs Terkel

89. “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?”

— Studs Terkel

90. “I can’t imagine a job where you go home and maybe go by a year later and you don’t know what you’ve done. My work, I can see what I did the first day I started. All my work is set right out there in the open and I can look at it as I go by. It’s something I can see the rest of my life.”

— Studs Terkel

91. “Tom Paine was a great American visionary. His book, Common Sense, sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in a population of four or five million. That means it was a best seller for years. People were thoughtful then. Hope is one thing. But you need to have hope with thought.”

— Studs Terkel

92. “The Grand Illusion, one of the great war films of all time.”

— Studs Terkel

93. “Because a book is a life, like one man is a life.”

— Studs Terkel

94. “I have a big mouth, and I never met a petition I didn’t like, so of course in the McCarthy days I got in trouble.”

— Studs Terkel

95. “I’m sure that in Germany people also took an oath of secrecy. We know what that eventually led to. If it works that way with us, the sanctions for breaking the secrecy are nothing compared to the sanctions there could be if we’re silent. All.”

— Studs Terkel

96. “I want to praise activists through the years. I praise those of the past as well, to have them honored.”

— Studs Terkel

97. “I was in combat for six weeks, forty-two days. I remember every hour, every minute, every incident of the whole forty-two days. What was it – forty years ago?”

— Studs Terkel

98. “So how are things going along? Pretty good. Going to be good tomorrow? Hope so.”

— Studs Terkel

99. “It seems the less affluent you are, the more you are able to trust people, the more you are able to give others.”

— Studs Terkel

100. “Much as I hate to say it, the Second World War did end the Great Depression. I think we solve our problems by killing our boys and others.”

— Studs Terkel