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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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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
Littles
Apart
Little
Gonna
Concern
Follow
Century
Sound
Next
Carelessly
Together
Tore

More quotes by Studs Terkel

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Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt.
Studs Terkel
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We're born eventually to die, of course. But what happens between the time we're born and we die? We're born to live. One is a realist if one hopes.
Studs Terkel
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I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be.
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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All you need in life is truth and beauty and you can find both at the Public Library.
Studs Terkel
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The answer is to say 'No!' to authority when authority is wrong.
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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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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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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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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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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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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I want, of course, peace, grace, and beauty. How do you do that? You work for it.
Studs Terkel
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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.
Studs Terkel
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I'm not an optimist. I'm hopeful.
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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People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being.
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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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