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Once you wake up the human animal, you can't put it back to sleep again.

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
Animal
Sleep
Back
Human
Humans
Wake

More quotes by Studs Terkel

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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.
Studs Terkel
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I want to praise activists through the years. I praise those of the past as well, to have them honored.
Studs Terkel
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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.
Studs Terkel
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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
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Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.
Studs Terkel
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People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being.
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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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
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I'd want the human voice expressing grievances, or delight, or whatever it might be. But something real
Studs Terkel
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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
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I want, of course, peace, grace, and beauty. How do you do that? You work for it.
Studs Terkel
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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.
Studs Terkel
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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.
Studs Terkel
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I hope for peace and sanity - it's the same thing.
Studs Terkel
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For the next century, we've got to put together what we so carelessly tore apart with so little concern for those who were gonna follow us. ... You've got to sound off.
Studs Terkel
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My epitaph? My epitaph will be, 'Curiosity did not kill this cat'.
Studs Terkel
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Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.
Studs Terkel
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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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You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist.
Studs Terkel
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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.
Studs Terkel