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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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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
Standards
Air
Ordinary
Word
Come
Patronizing
Done
Loathe
Things
Extraordinary
People
Across

More quotes by Studs Terkel

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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.
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More and more we are into communications and less and less into communication.
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But once you become active in something, something happens to you. You get excited and suddenly you realize you count.
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Religion obviously played a role in this book and the previous book, too.
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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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I suppose if I have an epitaph it would be: Curiosity Did Not Kill This Cat. I don't see retiring in the sense that we view it - I don't see how I could. Dying at the microphone or at the typewriter would not be bad.
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Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt.
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When it comes to the news, the corporate view is `objective,' all else is propaganda.
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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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Smug respectability, like the poor, we've had with us always. Today, however, ... such obtuseness is an indulgence we can no longer afford. The computer, nuclear energy for better or worse, and sudden, simultaneous influences upon everyone's TV screen have raised the ante and the risk considerably.
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My epitaph? My epitaph will be, 'Curiosity did not kill this cat'.
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I want a language that speaks the truth.
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Marvin Miller, I suspect, is the most effective union organizer since John L. Lewis.
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I'd want the human voice expressing grievances, or delight, or whatever it might be. But something real
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Once you wake up the human animal, you can't put it back to sleep again.
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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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I find labels liberal and conservative of little meaning. Our language has become perverted along with the thoughts of many of us.
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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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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.
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Never go to bed with someone whose problems are greater than yours.
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