Faith & Spirit Quote by Studs Terkel

Terkel’s line carries the sneaky radicalism of someone who spent a lifetime listening to Americans explain themselves without being corrected. “If solace is any sort of succor…that is sufficient” sounds almost redundant on purpose: he stacks synonyms to lower the temperature, to make comfort feel like a practical good rather than a theological debate. The point isn’t to romanticize belief. It’s to defend its usefulness against the sort of cultured disdain that treats faith as either superstition or ideology.

The subtext is a journalist’s ethic disguised as spiritual tolerance. Terkel doesn’t claim a single truth; he claims a standard of care. If a belief helps someone endure grief, poverty, illness, loneliness, the daily humiliations of being ignored by power, then it earns legitimacy. That’s a consequentialist stance, but it’s also a democratic one: he puts authority in lived experience, not institutions.

“I believe in the faith of people” flips the usual hierarchy. He’s less interested in what churches, parties, or intellectuals decree than in the messy, private engine that keeps ordinary people moving. Coming from a chronicler of working lives and oral histories, it reads as context: mid-century America, full of civic pieties and cold-war certainties, but also full of lives that didn’t fit the official story. Terkel’s sentence is a quiet rebuke to dogmatists and cynics alike. He’s arguing that belief, at minimum, can be a form of mutual aid - a way people patch themselves together when the social fabric won’t.