A biography for Studs Terkelhasn’t been written yet.
“I want, of course, peace, grace, and beauty. How do you do that? You work for it.”
“If solace is any sort of succor to someone, that is sufficient. I believe in the faith of people, whatever faith they may have.”
“Nonetheless, do I have respect for people who believe in the hereafter? Of course I do. I might add, perhaps even a touch of envy too, because of the solace.”
“I thought, if ever there were a time to write a book about hope, it's now.”
“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?”
“That's why I wrote this book: to show how these people can imbue us with hope. 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.”
“I want a language that speaks the truth.”
“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.”
“I hope for peace and sanity - it's the same thing.”
“I'm not up on the Internet, but I hear that is a democratic possibility. People can connect with each other. I think people are ready for something, but there is no leadership to offer it to them. People are ready to say, 'Yes, we are part of a world.'”
“Someone who does an act. In a democratic society, you're supposed to be an activist; that is, you participate. It could be a letter written to an editor.”
“I always love to quote Albert Einstein because nobody dares contradict him.”
“Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt.”
“With optimism, you look upon the sunny side of things. People say, 'Studs, you're an optimist.' I never said I was an optimist. I have hope because what's the alternative to hope? Despair? If you have despair, you might as well put your head in the oven.”
“You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist.”
“I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly-line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people.”
“Why are we born? 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.”
“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.”
“Religion obviously played a role in this book and the previous book, too.”
“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.”