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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.

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
Dying
Epitaph
Sense
Typewriter
Would
Retiring
Cat
Suppose
Curiosity
Kill
View
Microphone

More quotes by 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 think it's realistic to have hope. One can be a perverse idealist and say the easiest thing: 'I despair. The world's no good.' That's a perverse idealist. It's practical to hope, because the hope is for us to survive as a human species. That's very realistic.
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'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 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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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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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.
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
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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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Religion obviously played a role in this book and the previous book, too.
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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Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people.
Studs Terkel
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Ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things, and that's what it's all about. They must count.
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
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Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.
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 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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Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt.
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
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I thought, if ever there were a time to write a book about hope, it's now.
Studs Terkel