Success Quote by Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel isn’t making a sentimental plea for nostalgia; he’s issuing a practical warning about power. Coming from a journalist who spent decades recording working people, war veterans, organizers, waitresses, and CEOs, “memory” is less a private scrapbook than a public utility. Terkel’s whole project was built on the idea that history doesn’t just happen in capitols and boardrooms. It happens in kitchens, union halls, bus depots, and break rooms - and if those voices aren’t preserved, the record tilts toward whoever already has the microphone.

The spare construction does the work. “I hope” sounds modest, almost gentle, but it’s also a marker of fragility: memory won’t survive on its own. “Valued” is the tell. He’s not worried about the brain’s ability to store facts; he’s worried about a culture that treats the past as disposable, an inconvenience to the forward march of markets, trends, and official narratives. The second clause - “that we do not lose memory” - repeats the term as if to insist on its materiality, like something you can misplace, steal, or have taken from you.

Context matters: Terkel came of age amid Depression-era hardship, WWII propaganda, the Cold War’s coercions, and the amnesia cycles of postwar prosperity. His oral histories fought the smooth myth of national innocence by keeping contradiction on tape. The subtext is accountability: without memory, injustice becomes “complicated,” and the same old tricks can be sold as new.