177 Quotes by Studs Terkel

So how are things going along? Pretty good. Going to be good tomorrow? Hope so.

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.

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.

One night a guy hit his head on a welding gun. He went to his knees. He was bleeding like a pig, blood was oozing out. So I stopped the line for a second and ran over to help him. The foreman turned the line on again, he almost stepped on the guy. That's the first thing they always do. They didn't even call an ambulance. The guy walked to the medic department -- that's about half a mile -- he had about five stitches put in his head. The foreman didn't say anything. He just turned the line on. You're nothing to any of them.

Once you wake up the human animal, you can't put it back to sleep again.

I was born in the year the Titanic sank. The Titanic went down, and I came up. That tells you a little about the fairness of life.

Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not forlong, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.

You can work next to a guy for months without even knowing his name.

Never go to bed with someone whose problems are greater than yours.