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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

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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
World
Young
Books
Firsts
Asks
Book
Woman
First
White
Work
War
Time
Jobs
Life
Black
Like
Kids
Normandy

More quotes by Studs Terkel

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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
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But once you become active in something, something happens to you. You get excited and suddenly you realize you count.
Studs Terkel
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You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist.
Studs Terkel
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Cannot Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' be subject to transposition: the evil of banality?
Studs Terkel
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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
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My epitaph? My epitaph will be, 'Curiosity did not kill this cat'.
Studs Terkel
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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
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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.
Studs Terkel
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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
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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.
Studs Terkel
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I want a language that speaks the truth.
Studs Terkel
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People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being.
Studs Terkel
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Ordinary' is a word I loathe. It has a patronizing air. I have come across ordinary people who have done extraordinary things.
Studs Terkel
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Unless there's a grassroots movement of some sort, with TV and the media in general in the hands of fewer and fewer people - the Murdochians, you know - all we hear is the one point of view. There has to be something communal.
Studs Terkel
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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
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I thought, if ever there were a time to write a book about hope, it's now.
Studs Terkel
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Work is a search for daily meaning as well as for daily bread.
Studs Terkel
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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
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Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.
Studs Terkel
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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