Quote

In order for us, black and white, to disenthrall ourselves from the harshest slavemaster, racism, we must disinter our buried history.... We are all the Pilgrim, setting out on this journey.

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
History
Harshest
Black
Pilgrim
Order
Settings
Must
Buried
Racism
Setting
Journey
White

More quotes by 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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My epitaph? My epitaph will be, 'Curiosity did not kill this cat'.
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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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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I'm not an optimist. I'm hopeful.
Studs Terkel
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More and more we are into communications and less and less into communication.
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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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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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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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
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Marvin Miller, I suspect, is the most effective union organizer since John L. Lewis.
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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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 call myself a radical conservative. What's that? Well, let's analyze it. Go to the dictionary. Radical: One who gets to the roots of things. And I'm a conservative because I want to conserve the green of the grass, the potability of drinking water, the first amendment of the Constitution and whatever sanity we have left.
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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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 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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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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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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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.
Studs Terkel