177 Quotes by Studs Terkel

They say all people who lived under Hitler were bad because they fought the war with him. That is wrong. We can’t say all people were bad. We must find out why they were with him. If you want to make something better, you must know the reasons why it was wrong and what has happened. My.

It is still the arena of those who dream of the City of Man and those who envision a City of Things. The battle appears to be forever joined. The armies, ignorant and enlightened, clash by day as well as night. Chicago is America’s dream, writ large. And flamboyantly.

We are living in the United States of Alzheimer’s. A whole country has lost its memory. When it can’t remember yesterday, a country forgets what it once wanted to be.

The Grand Illusion, one of the great war films of all time.

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

You know, ‘power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely?’ It’s the same with powerlessness. Absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely. Einstein said everything had changed since the atom was split, except the way we think. We have to think anew.

I said, “Suppose communists come out against cancer, do we have to automatically come out for cancer?‘” I can’t take back that I’m against the poll tax, that I’m against lynching, that I’m for peace.

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?

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.