Studs Terkel Quotes

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.

I always love to quote Albert Einstein because nobody dares contradict him.

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. -Studs Terkel

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

More and more we are into communications; and less and less into communication.

Curiosity never killed this cat’ — that’s what I’d like as my epitaph

How come you don't work fourteen hours a day? Your great-great-grandparents did. How come you only work the eight-hour day? Four guys got hanged fighting for the eight-hour day for you.

What I remember most of those times is that poverty creates desperation, and desperation creates violence.

God, grant me serenity to accept those things I can't change, the courage to change those I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." -Division St.

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.

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." Bill Talcott - Organizer

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.

The poor are so busy trying to survive from one day to the next, they haven’t the time or energy to keep score.

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.

I'm not an optimist. I'm hopeful.

We have two Governments in Washington: one run by the elected people—which is a minor part—and one run by the moneyed interests, which control everything.

The whole program of unemployment insurance, Social Security, was a confession of the failure of our whole social order. And confession of failure of Christian principles: that man, in fact, did not look after his brother.

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.

They would sit and talk and tell us their hard luck story. Whether it was true or not, we never questioned it. It’s very important you learn people as people are.

The worst day-to-day operators of businesses are bankers.

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.

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)

I am paraphrasing Einstein. I love to do that: nobody dares contradict me.

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.

Because a book is a life, like one man is a life.

This I remember. Some people put this out of their minds and forget it. I don’t. I don’t want to forget it. I don’t want it to take the best of me, but I want to be there because this is what happened. This is the truth, you know. History.

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

Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people. Nora Watson quoted by Studs Terkel2

Though we labor with our minds, this place we can relax in was built by someone who can work with his hands. And his work is as noble as ours. I think the poet owes something to the guy who builds the cabin for him.

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. Studs Terkel

People who were personally concerned about a better world, came to Washington, were drawn to it. Even though where we were going was still to be worked out. There was an elan, an optimism . . . an evangelism . . . it was an adventure.

It is about a search, too, 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. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.

A man? If I need a man, wouldn't you think I'd have one of my own? Must I wait for you?

I don’t know if I’m partisan to the underdog or whether I’m the underdog.

If I had enough money, I would take busloads of people out to the fields and into the labor camps. Then they’d know how that fine salad got on their table.

It isn't the calendar age that determines a man's restlessness. It is daily circumstance, an *awareness* of being hurt, and an inordinate hunger for "another way".

How goddamn foolish it is, the war. They's no war in the worth that's worth fightin' for. I don't care where it is. They can't tell me any different. Money, money is the thing that causes it all. I wouldn't be a bit surprised that the people that start wars and promote 'em are the men that make the money, make the ammunition, make the clothing and so forth. Just think of the poor kids that are starvin' to death in Asia and so forth that could be fed with how much you make one big shell of. ~Alvin "Tommy" Bridges

When I get kind of low, I’d think about a verse I learned at one time, when everybody was fighting me. It went something like this: He has no enemies, you say, My friend, the boast is poor. He who hath mingled in the fray Of duty that the brave endure Must have foes. If he has none, Small is the work he has done. He has hit no traitor on the hip, Has cast no cup from perjured lip, Has never turned the wrong to right, He’s been a coward in the fight.

I’m not joking when I refer to our country as the United States of Amnesia, although I was corrected recently by Studs Terkel out of Chicago. And he said, “Gore, it’s not the United States of Amnesia; it’s the United States of Alzheimer’s.” I stand corrected.

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

It was an exciting community, where we lived in Washington. The basic feeling—and I don’t think this is just nostalgia—was one of excitement, of achievement, of happiness. Life was important, life was significant.

Ruby Bates, one of the young white girls, was a remarkable person. She told me she had been driven into prostitution when she was thirteen. She had been working in a textile mill for a pittance. When she asked for a raise, the boss told her to make it up by going with the workers. She told me there was nothing else she could do...Ruby Bates was a remarkable woman. Underneath it all—the poverty, the degradation—she was decent, pure. Here was an illiterate white girl, all of whose training had been clouded by the myths of white supremacy, who, in the struggle for the lives of these nine innocent boys, had come to see the role she was being forced to play. As a murderer. She turned against her oppressors. . .. I shall never forget her.

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.

We forgot what happened yesterday. We know all about Paris Hilton. We know about that. But what do we know about why we are there in Iraq?

Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread.

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

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

Reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation

what oral historian Studs Terkel called “a Monday through Friday kind of dying.

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.

I began to see how everything was so wrong. When growers can have an intricate watering system to irrigate their crops but they can’t have running water inside the houses of workers.

After the stock market crash, some New York editors suggested that hearings be held: what had really caused the Depression? They were held in Washington. In retrospect, they make the finest comic reading. The leading industrialists and bankers testified. They hadn’t the foggiest notion what had gone bad. You read a transcript of that record today with amazement: that they could be so unaware. This was their business, yet they didn’t understand the operation of the economy. The only good witnesses were the college professors, who enjoyed a bad reputation in those years. No professor was supposed to know anything practical about the economy.

We sent him to school for him to take this heavy equipment. I worked and cooked over at the school, helped send him there. I said, “I’m not sendin’ you to school to come out here and go to work for these strip mines.” I’d rather see him in Vietnam than see him doin’ strip jobs.

You should have seen the things they were giving babies instead of milk. I remember seeing them put salt-pork gravy in milk bottles and putting a nipple on, and the baby sucking this salt-pork gravy. A real blue baby, dying of starvation. In house after house, I saw that sort of thing.

I’ll never forget that Depression Easter Sunday. Our son was four years old. I bought ten or fifteen cents’ worth of eggs. You didn’t get too many eggs for that. But we were down. Margaret said, ‘Why he’ll find those in five minutes.’ I had a couple in the piano and all around. Tommy got his little Easter basket, and as he would find the eggs, I’d steal ’em out of the basket and re-hide them. The kid had more fun that Easter than he ever had. He hunted Easter eggs for three hours and he never knew the difference. (Laughs.) “My son is now thirty-nine years old. And I bore him to death every Easter with the story. He never even noticed his bag full of Easter eggs never got any fuller. . . .

I feel guilty because I think people should do something they really like to do in life. I should do something else, but there is nothing I can do really well. I’m established and make a steady living, so it becomes pretty easy. It’s not very fulfilling . . . but I’m lazy, I admit it. It’s an easier thing to do.

Working in the fields is not in itself a degrading job. It’s hard, but if you’re given regular hours, better pay, decent housing, unemployment and medical compensation, pension plans—we have a very relaxed way of living. But the growers don’t recognize us as persons. That’s the worst thing, the way they treat you. Like we have no brains. Now we see they have no brains. They have only a wallet in their head. The more you squeeze it, the more they cry out.

What about Hitler? He was one person. They were all doing what Hitler said. What do all prisoners do? They do what the warden says. The only power Hitler had was the power the people gave him. I felt the whole world had gone absolutely mad,

The total cost of the Federal Arts Project was only $23 million. Many of these paintings, sculptures and prints were given to museums, courthouses, public buildings. . .. I think that today those in museums alone are worth about $100 million.

If they wanted a half-inch, you have to be able to give them a half-inch. I mean, not an inch, not two inches. Those holes must line up exactly or they won’t make their iron. And when you swing, you have to swing real smooth. You can’t have your iron swinging back and forth, oscillating. If you do this, they’ll refuse to work with you, because their life is at stake.

In the meantime, I would work in the relief office and I began interviewing people . . . and found out how everybody, in order to be eligible for relief, had to have reached absolute bottom. You didn’t have to have a lot of brains to realize that once they reached that stage and you put them on an allowance of a dollar a day for food—how could they ever pull out of it?

I wanted to be at my parents’ house when electricity came. It was in 1940. We’d all go around flipping the switch, to make sure it hadn’t come on yet. We didn’t want to miss it. When they finally came on, the lights just barely glowed. I remember my mother smiling. When they came on full, tears started to run down her cheeks. After a while, she said: “Oh, if we only had it when you children were growing up.” We had lots of illness. Anyone who’s never been in a family without electricity—with illness—can’ t imagine the difference.

This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence - to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.

You try to fill up your time with trying to think about other things: what you’re going to do on the weekend or about your family. You have to use your imagination. If you don’t have a very good one and you bore easily, you’re in trouble. Just to fill in time, I write real bad poetry or letters to myself and to other people and never mail them. The letters are fantasies, sort of rambling, how I feel, how depressed I am.

He made me so angry. Here is this motherfucker, who is comfortable, he’s not struggling — in truth, there’s not a hell of a lot for him to struggle about, ‘cause he’s a fuckin’ marshmallow in a bag of marshmallows. He’s a nice guy. I mean, I like him. But he’s a fuckin’ marshmallow.

The Chicago historian Studs Terkel asked Bob Dylan in the sixties about how he went about writing a song and trying to outdo himself, or at least being as good as the last song he wrote, and his response was pretty damn perfect. “I’m content with the same old piece of wood,” he said. “I just want to find another place to pound a nail . . . Music, my writing, is something special, not sacred.” If the songs Bob Dylan wrote aren’t sacred, then nobody’s songs are sacred. Nobody’s. No one has ever laid on their deathbed thinking, “Thank god I didn’t make that song. Thank god I didn’t make that piece of art. Thank god I avoided the embarrassment of putting a bad poem into the world.” Nobody reaches the end of their life and regrets even a single moment of creating something, no matter how shitty or unappreciated that something might have been. I’m writing this just weeks after returning from Belleville, where I sat next to my dad’s bed in my childhood house and watched him die. I can guarantee you that in the final moments of his life, he wasn’t kicking himself for all those times when he dared to make a fool of himself by singing too loud.

My mom had always wanted me to better myself. I wanted to better myself because of her. Now when the strikes started, I told her I was going to join the union and the whole movement. I told her I was going to work without pay. She said she was proud of me. (His eyes glisten. A long, long pause.) See, I told her I wanted to be with my people. If I were a company man, nobody would like me any more. I had to belong to somebody and this was it right here. She said, “I pushed you in your early years to try to better yourself and get a social position. But I see that’s not the answer. I know I’ll be proud of you.

It was in ’35—we had this campaign to raise a million tax dollars. In the town of Phillips, one evening, during a blizzard, I was met by a crowd of miners. They were given the day off and a stake to attend this meeting. They surrounded me and said this tax would cost six hundred of them their jobs. They were busted farmers and fortunately found a job in these Home Stake mines. I went back home feeling worried. But the tax was passed, and not a single miner lost his job.

The overt hustling society is the microcosm of the rest of the society. The power relationships are the same and the games are the same. Only this one I was in control of. The greater one I wasn’t. In the outside society, if I tried to be me, I wasn’t in control of anything. As a bright, assertive woman, I had no power. As a cold, manipulative hustler, I had a lot. I knew I was playing a role. Most women are taught to become what they act. All I did was act out the reality of American womanhood.

Studs Terkel was waiting for a number 146 bus alongside two well-groomed business types. "This was before the term yuppie was used," he explains. "But that was what they were. He was in Brooks Brothers and Gucci shoes and carrying the Wall Street Journal under his arm. She was a looker. I mean stunning - Bloomingdales and Neiman Marcus and carrying Vanity Fair." Terkel, who is 95, has long been a Chicago icon, every bit as accessible and integral to the cultural life of the Windy City as Susan Sontag was to New York. He had shared the bus stop with this couple for several mornings but they had always failed to acknowledge him. "It hurts my ego," he quips. "But this morning the bus was late and I thought, this is my chance." The rest of the story is his. "I say, 'Labour Day is coming up.' Well, it was the wrong thing to say. He looks toward me with a look of such contempt it's like Noel Coward has just spotted a bug on his collar. He says, 'We despise unions.' I thought, oooooh. The bus is still late. I've got a winner here. Suddenly I'm the ancient mariner and I fix him with my glittering eye. 'How many hours a day do you work?' I ask. He says, 'Eight.' 'How comes you don't work 18 hours a day like your great-great-grandfather did? You know why? Because four guys got hanged in Chicago in 1886 fighting for the eight-hour day ... For you.

Much as I hate to say it, the Second World War did end the Great Depression. I think we solve our problems by killing our boys and others.

Automation? Depends how it’s applied. It frightens me if it puts me out on the street. It doesn’t frighten me if it shortens my work week.

I’ve never understood a society of want. We don’t have a society of want—not on a general level. We have a society of total surplus: unwanted goods and unwanted people.

I was in combat for six weeks, forty-two days. I remember every hour, every minute, every incident of the whole forty-two days. What was it—forty years ago?

Their impoverished condition somehow made them very real people. It’s hard to be phony when you haven’t got anything.

It seems the less affluent you are, the more you are able to trust people, the more you are able to give others.

Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up.

As long as you can say I’m better than they are, then there’s somebody below you can kick. But once you get over that, you see that you’re not any better off than they are. In fact, you’re worse off ‘cause you’re believin’ a lie.

Yet, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” opens up a political question. Why should this man be penniless at any time in his life, due to some fantastic thing called a Depression or sickness or whatever it is that makes him so insecure?

We long to feel good about our work. In his brilliant way of writing, Studs Terkel explained over 40 years ago what people wanted from their work efforts: “It is about a search, too, 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. . . . To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.”2

Thomas Paine’s vision of the American is being profaned. What he wrote in 1791 is on the button in 2003: “Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing. … In such a situation, man becomes what he ought. He sees his species, not with the inhuman idea of a natural enemy, but as a kindred.

I’m sure that in Germany people also took an oath of secrecy. We know what that eventually led to. If it works that way with us, the sanctions for breaking the secrecy are nothing compared to the sanctions there could be if we’re silent. All

I’ll never forget one of the first families I visited. The father was a railroad man who had lost his job. I was told by my supervisor that I really had to see the poverty. If the family needed clothing, I was to investigate how much clothing they had at hand. So I looked into this man’s closet—(pauses, it becomes difficult)—he was a tall, gray-haired man, though not terribly old. He let me look in the closet—he was so insulted. (She weeps angrily.) He said, “Why are you doing this?” I remember his feeling of humiliation . . . this terrible humiliation. (She can’t continue. After a pause, she resumes.) He said, “I really haven’t anything to hide, but if you really must look into it. . ..” I could see he was very proud. He was so deeply humiliated. And I was, too. . ..

I was sleeping on the bodies of killed German soldiers. The Germans were very orderly people. When they found they didn’t have time to bury these bodies, they laid them next to each other in a very neat and orderly way. I saw straight rows, like pieces of cordwood. Exact.

It’s a strange thing. This is only thirty-five years ago—Roosevelt, Wallace. We have a new generation in business today. Successful. It’s surprising how quickly they forget the assistance their fathers got from the Government. The Farm Bureau, which I helped organize in this state, didn’t help us in ’35. They take the same position today: we don’t need the Government. I’m just as sure as I’m sitting here, we can’t do it ourselves. Individuals have too many different interests. Who baled out the land banks when they were busted in the Thirties? It was the Federal

I don’t see where people get all this bull about the kid who’s gonna be President and being a newsboy made a President out of him. It taught him how to handle his money and this bull. You know what it did? It taught him how to hate the people on his route. And the printers. And dogs.

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

I can’t imagine a job where you go home and maybe go by a year later and you don’t know what you’ve done. My work, I can see what I did the first day I started. All my work is set right out there in the open and I can look at it as I go by. It’s something I can see the rest of my life.

It's a strange thing. I hardly find anybody today who doesn't agree that the ledger should not determine how we live. Most people think it's terrible that the pollution in Lake Michigan is being decided by how much it'll cost companies to cure it. People are realizing that an environment is being created that will be as dangerous for capitalists to live in as well as for the working people...that it's insane to let major things be decided on the basis of black figures and red figures. I find temperate people saying today that the business-motivated system isn't a safe thing to have around.

We’re in bad shape as a country. We’re suffering from the collapse of both political parties. They’re bought out. They’re owned by corporate America, lock, stock, and barrel. The media is sold out. The corporate dominant culture, which is driven by the market, the bottom line, sells out everything.

We thought of the poor, at that time, as quite divorced from us, who were not poor. By the exercise of one’s charity, life could be made all right. You would always have the poor with you, they were the unfortunate, and you made donations. You could handle them. It was mildly unpleasant, but not fundamentally upsetting. Now, for the first time, we face the dreadful reality that we are not separated. They are us. They are something we have made. There is no conceivable way today to say: Fish, and you’ll be all right. In hurt, in anguish, in shock, we are becoming aware that it is ourselves, who have to be found wanting, not the poor.

That's one of the things about the Depression. There was more camaraderie than there is now. Even more comradeship than the Commies could even dream about. That was one of the feelings that America lost. People had different ideas, they disagreed with one another. But there was a fine feeling among them. You were in trouble...damn it, if they could help ya, they would help ya.

Why did these big wheels kill themselves? They weren’t able to live up to the standards they were accustomed to, and they got ashamed in front of their women. You see, you can tell anybody a lie, and he’ll agree with you. But you start layin’ down the facts of real life, he won’t accept it. The American white man has been superior so long, he can’t figure out why he should come down.

I wanted to be accepted. It must have been in sixth grade. It was just before the Fourth of July. They were trying out students for this patriotic play. I wanted to do Abe Lincoln, so I learned the Gettysburg Address inside and out. I’d be out in the fields pickin’ the crops and I’d be memorizin’. I was the only one who didn’t have to read the part, ’cause I learned it. The part was given to a girl who was a grower’s daughter. She had to read it out of a book, but they said she had better diction. I was very disappointed. I quit about eighth grade. “Any time anybody’d talk to me about politics, about civil rights, I would ignore it. It’s a very degrading thing because you can’t express yourself. They wanted us to speak English in the school classes. We’d put out a real effort. I would get into a lot of fights because I spoke Spanish and they couldn’t understand it. I was punished. I was kept after school for not speaking English.

When I went in the military, they asked, 'What race are you?' I had no idea what they were talking about because in Hawaii we don't question a man's race. They said, 'Where are your parents from?' I said they were born in Hawaii. 'Your grandparents?' They were born in Hawaii. 'How about your great-grandparents?' I said they're from Europe. Some from Spain, some from Wales. They said, 'You're Caucasian.' I said, 'What's that?' They said, 'You're white.' I looked at my skin. I was pretty dark, tanned by the sun. I said, 'You're kidding.' They put me down as Caucasian and separated me from the rest of the Hawaiians. … Some of my new buddies asked me not to talk to three of the men. I asked why. They said, 'They're Jews.' I said, 'What's a Jew?' They said, 'Don't you know? They killed Jesus Christ.' I says, 'You mean them guys? They don't look old enough.' They said, 'You're tryin' to get smart?' I said, 'No. It's my understanding he was killed about nineteen hundred years ago.' pp. 19-20.

We had to go to stew school for five weeks. We’d go through a whole week of make-up and poise. I didn’t like this. They make you feel like you’ve never been out in public. They showed you how to smoke a cigarette, when to smoke a cigarette, how to look at a man’s eyes. Our teacher, she had this idea we had to be sexy. One day in class she was showing us how to accept a light for a cigarette from a man and never blow it out. When he lights it, just look in his eyes. It was really funny, all the girls laughed.

I don’t know what I’d like to do. That’s what hurts the most. That’s why I can’t quit the job. I really don’t know what talents I may have. And I don’t know where to go to find out. I’ve been fostered so long by school and didn’t have time to think about it. My father’s in watch repair. That’s always interested me, working with my hands, and independent. I don’t think I’d mind going back and learning something, taking a piece of furniture and refinishing it. The type of thing where you know what you’re doing and you can create and you can fix something to make it function. At the switchboard you don’t do much of anything.

I’m excited to announce that Book 2 of our series, My Job: More People at Work Around the World, is in production. Having met hundreds of people in fascinating jobs, I faced an enormous challenge in selecting the stories to include in Book 2 . . . but I believe this collection will surprise and delight you. It covers a range of jobs in the following sections: Health and Recovery Education and Finance Agribusiness and Food Processing Arts and Culture Activism and Diplomacy The book allows you to experience what it’s like to be an addiction-recovery counselor trained as a clown in London, an art teacher working with gang members in Chicago, a midwife working in rural villages in Guatemala, or a mobile-banking agent making her first million in Zambia. Book 2 will take you places you’ve never been, from the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia to a serene beach in Tel Aviv, Israel, and take you deep into the true stories of what it’s like to work at jobs as disparate as teaching a grieving widow to dance, to negotiating with a terrorist. The book will publish in March and is available for preorder at Amazon.

The white American is not innately racist. I sense innate docility. He will follow the law if the leadership tells him to do that. He would not rebel if he thought he'd be punished. But if the laws are flouted and winked at, he'll wink, too.' - interview with Leona Brady

More or less," that most ambiguous of phrases, pervades many of the conversations that comprise this book, reflecting, perhaps, the ambiguity of attitude toward The Job. Something more than Orwellian acceptance, something less than Luddite sabotage. Often the two impulses are fused in the same person.