177 Quotes by Studs Terkel

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being.

I presumably lost $150,000 in the depression of 1937—on my one stock investment—because I did everything Lehman Brothers told me. I said, well, this is a fool’s procedure . . . buying stock in other people’s businesses.

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.

Everybody's entitled to that forty acres and a mule. You're going to do the work, but you have to have something to work with. If you don't have a job, where do you go from there? You hear people say Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you don't even have shoes. You're barefooted. What are you going to pull yourself up by? Our country owes every citizen of the United States of America a means of livelihood. Not a handout, but a way to make it.

So, my credo consists of the pursuit and the act. One without the other is self-indulgence.

Chicago is not the most corrupt of cities. The state of New Jersey has a couple. Need we mention Nevada? Chicago, though, is the Big Daddy. Not more corrupt, just more theatrical, more colorful in its shadiness.

Work is born in us. We take to it kindly or unkindly. The terms may be easy or harsh, but the contract is binding.

If solace is any sort of succor to someone, that is sufficient. I believe in the faith of people, whatever faith they may have.

Ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things, and that's what it's all about. They must count.