Great Throughts Treasury

"Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits."

"Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people."

"One time, ... I was doing 'Studs Place,' my early TV show, and I'm supposed to be quitting cigars and I'm yearning for a smoke and I quote from the 'Odyssey.' I say, I am Ulysses passing the Isle of Circe. Meaning I got these temptations. Truck drivers called in and said they liked the classical reference."

"Out of the darkness they'll come. And somewhere out of the tribal memory will come a name. Sh... sh... sh... sh... Shakespeare."

"My doctors were of one mind: unless something was immediately done, I had maybe six months to live. A quintuple bypass was suggested. Quintuple! I was impressed, though somewhat disturbed because I was in the middle of work on a new book."

"My whole life has been an accretion of accidents. I went to University of Chicago law school to become Clarence Darrow. I was a streetcar student. There was a long stopover in what was known as Brownsville -- the black community. Out of these stores you'd hear music and could buy records. Louie Armstrong's West End Blues with Earl Hines at the piano. What I learned from law school was Louie, Duke and Memphis Minnie. That's what led me to the radio."

"Most people were raised to think they are not worthy. School is a process of taking beautiful kids who are filled with life and beating them into happy slavery. That's as true of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year executive as it is for the poorest."

"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."

"Nobody's challenged the use of the phrase: Pro-life. They call it pro-life. But it's anti-life. What happens when that child is black and he becomes 13? Are they pro his life?"

"Not because of its commercial value, but the name of Field's represents our past, ... The past is being erased."

"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."

"Ordinary people? I hate the word ordinary. It's patro"

"Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell."

"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."

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

"Tell me: Who built the pyramids? People say: The Pharaohs built the pyramids. The Pharaohs? The Pharaohs didn't lift a finger. Anonymous slaves built the pyramids. They're the ones who could tell you what it was like. That's what I'm getting at when I talk about looking at history from the bottom up."

"Smug respectability, like the poor, we've had with us always. Today, however, ... such obtuseness is an indulgence we can no longer afford. The computer, nuclear energy for better or worse, and sudden, simultaneous influences upon everyone's TV screen have raised the ante and the risk considerably."

"Religion obviously played a role in this book and the previous book, too."

"So people are ready. I feel hopeful in that sense."

"Suddenly the sirens are sounding all over Chicago. At the time, the Cold War was going on between us and Russia, and there was great fear through the air. And when people heard the sirens, old women had heart attacks and kids ran under beds because that's what they were taught in school. I remember that moment most, the sirens going on and people not celebrating the Sox but hurrying to the grocery store to store up on stuff for the next month of siege, for [they believed] the Russians were coming."

"Terkel: Yes, but these days they're mostly in business, or politics."

"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."

"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."

"The Day to remember is August 6, 1945. That's the important day."

"Think of that, everything destroyed and all the culture with it, and our children's children's children living in caves."

"There are nascent stirrings in the neighborhood and in the field, articulated by non-celebrated people who bespeak the dreams of their fellows. It may be catching. Unfortunately, it is not covered on the six o'clock news."

"The key issue is jobs. You can't get away from it: jobs. Having a buck or two in your pocket and feeling like somebody."

"The pharaohs didn't lift a finger. That's king and queen. Mrs. Pharaoh's fingernails were as immaculately manicured as Elizabeth Taylor's in Cleopatra. Who built the pyramids? Anonymous slaves down through the centuries."

"To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us."

"Today, more and more, because of the nature of the press and TV and radio, celebrityhood has taken over, and trivia takes over."

"Tom Paine was a great American visionary. His book, Common Sense, sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in a population of four or five million. That means it was a best seller for years. People were thoughtful then. Hope is one thing. But you need to have hope with thought."

"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."

"We are the most powerful nation in the world, but we're not the only nation in the world. We are not the only people in the world. We are an important people, the wealthiest, the most powerful and, to a great extent, generous. But we are part of the world."

"What's it like to be that goofy little soldier, scared stiff, with his bayonet aimed at Christ? What's it like to have been a woman in a defense-plant job during World War II? What's it like to be a kid at the front lines? It's all funny and tragic at the same time"

"We have sabotaged the American language."

"We use the word 'hope' perhaps more often than any other word in the vocabulary: 'I hope it's a nice day.' 'Hopefully, you're doing well.' 'So how are things going along? Pretty good. Going to be good tomorrow? Hope so.'"

"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."

"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."

"We hear the term independent contractors in Iraq. Independent contractors? Mercenaries!"

"What I bring to the interview is respect. The person recognizes that you respect them because you're listening. Because you're listening, they feel good about talking to you. When someone tells me a thing that happened, what do I feel inside? I want to get the story out. It's for the person who reads it to have the feeling . . . In most cases the person I encounter is not a celebrity; rather the ordinary person. Ordinary is a word I loathe. It has a patronizing air. I have come across ordinary people who have done extraordinary things. (p. 176)"

"When you become part of something, in some way you count. It could be a march; it could be a rally, even a brief one. You're part of something, and you suddenly realize you count. To count is very important."

"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 ask what the score of the game was and they wouldn't know who's playing."

"You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist."

"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."

"You know what Einstein said: If there's a World War Three, I don't know what weapons we'll use, but I know the weapons of World War Four: Sticks and stones. Now, think about that. He is saying that our ancestors way, way, way back, who we think of with bull hides on back and sticks in hands, will now be our children's children's children."