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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

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Studs Terkel
Age: 96 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 16
Died: 2008
Died: October 31
Actor
Author
Historian
Journalist
Music Journalist
Poet Lawyer
Radio Personality
Writer
New York City
New York
Louis Terkel
Labor
Broadcasters
Four
Hanged
Guy
Grandparents
Hours
Fourteen
Fighting
Grandparent
Come
Eight
Great
Hour
Work
Guys

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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.
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Religion obviously played a role in this book and the previous book, too.
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Never go to bed with someone whose problems are greater than yours.
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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.
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Ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things, and that's what it's all about. They must count.
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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.
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I thought, if ever there were a time to write a book about hope, it's now.
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You can work next to a guy for months without even knowing his name.
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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.
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Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt.
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Marvin Miller, I suspect, is the most effective union organizer since John L. Lewis.
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I want a language that speaks the truth.
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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.
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I'm not an optimist. I'm hopeful.
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Last year I picked up the New York Times and there was a story about a kid from Dartmouth who was bragging that he never left his room, and made dates and ordered pizza with his computer. The piece de resistance of this story was that he had two roommates, and he was proud of the fact that he only talked to them by computer.
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Work is born in us. We take to it kindly or unkindly. The terms may be easy or harsh, but the contract is binding.
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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.
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Once you wake up the human animal, you can't put it back to sleep again.
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Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.
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Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.
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