Philadelphia Quotes

Once I took a bus from my home in Maryland to Philadelphia to live on the streets with some musicians for a few weeks, and then my parents sent me to boarding school at Andover to shape me up.

I was born in Philadelphia and currently live in Minneapolis. I write for both children and adults.

Philadelphia merely seems dull because it's next to exciting Camden, New Jersey.

In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents?

I think everybody from Philadelphia been shot at before.

The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.

At noon, on the Fourth of July, 1826, while the Liberty Bell was again sounding its old message to the people of Philadelphia, the soul of Thomas Jefferson passed on; and a few hours later John Adams entered into rest, with the name of his old friend upon his lips.

In those days, slavery was not looked upon, even in Quaker Philadelphia, with the shudder and abhorrence one feels towards it now.

I applied for a scholarship to Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. I knew I was good enough, but they turned me down. And it took me about six months to realize it was because I was black. I never really got over that jolt of racism at the time.

When you get that nice celebration coming into the dugout and you're getting your ass hammered by guys, there's no better feeling than to have that done.

If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.

It is true that the American colonials have "free elections," in which they have the absolute right to vote for one of two opposing candidates, both of whom have been handpicked and financed by the Rockefeller syndicate. This touching evidence of "democracy" serves to convince most Americana that we are indeed a free people. We even have a cracked Liberty Bell in Philadelphia to prove it.

First prize was a week in Philadelphia. Second prize was two weeks.

The only thing I can cheer for in Philadelphia is the national anthem.

When I was in Philadelphia during the Depression in 1930 or '31, I got a very sad job as a night watchman in a garage. The cars in the garage had been abandoned by their owners, since they had lost their jobs and couldn't keep up the payments.

I cannot accept this invitation [to celebrate the bicentenial of the Constitution], for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever 'fixed' at the Philadelphia Convention... To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start. [Progressive]

Let every man or woman here remember this, that if you wish to be great at all, you must begin where you are and with what you are. He who would be great anywhere must first be great in his own Philadelphia.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a house of artistic and intellectual prostitution

On coaching the 1970s Philadelphia Flyers: Nobody likes us. Nobody outside Philadelphia, that is. In fact, the nicest thing people say about us is that we are a bunch of muggers.

It's been rough for me trying to find my position in the struggle and where my voice is needed and helpful. You know, I grew up in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia has a really rough police-brutality history. I grew up in a neighborhood where it was very clear that the police were "them" and we were "us".

Outside Independence Hall when the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended, Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, "A republic, if you can keep it."

The streets are safe in Philadelphia. It's only the people who make them unsafe.

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

Like most struggling writers trying to get their scripts commissioned, I had to do something odd to pay the rent. So, aged 21, I started up my own small cheesecake company in Philadelphia.

On his homesickness during the Barcelona Olympics -I miss America. I miss crime and murder. I miss Philadelphia. There hasn't been a brutal stabbing or anything here the last 24 hours. I've missed it.

The Constitution was written by 55 educated and highly intelligent men in Philadelphia in 1787, but it was written so that it could be understood by people of limited education and modest intelligence.

At his Philadelphia alma mater, Temple University, Cosby gave commencement addresses and attended games. He served on the university`s board of trustees for more than three decades.

I'm a secret interior decorator. There's a mural on my dining room wall of the railroad tracks at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. I love having my hometown with me out here in California.

I've never known a Philadelphian who wasn't a downright 'character'; possibly a defense mechanism resulting from the dullness of their native habitat.

I love the dignity in the name Philadelphia, but at heart, we're Philly.

Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.

I grew up in a very racially integrated place called Pottstown. It was an agricultural / industrial town which has since become a suburb of Philadelphia. I grew up basically in a black neighborhood.

Philadelphia is a depressing intellectual slum

In Philadelphia, I inadvertently came upon an edition of Robert Ingersoll's Essays and Lectures. This was an exciting discovery; his atheism confirmed my own belief that the horrific cruelty of the Old Testament was degrading to the human spirit.

I grew up in somewhat of a war zone in West Philadelphia in 1985, '86. It wasn't as extreme as someone coming in the classroom and just unloading on a class, but I knew to take the scenic route to go to the grocery store to avoid certain elements.

If you're associated with the Philadelphia media or town, you look for negatives. I don't know if there's something about their upbringing or they have too many hoagies, or too much cream cheese.

Cats do not abide by the laws of nature.

Someone thought that I dropped out of Harvard. I am a college dropout, but I dropped out of Temple University in Philadelphia.

The Philadelphia Phillies are 2008 world champions of baseball.

I don't have many actors in my family, but I do have a Great Uncle that is a film-maker in Philadelphia, and my great-great-grandparents were Flamenco dancers in the 30's in New York, they were Spanish dancers.

Philadelphia, wonderful town, spent a week there one night

So [Donald ] Trump gave a speech on national security and military affairs to a military-themed audience in Philadelphia, and there was no vulgarity in it. There was no bombast. There wasn't any of the usual Trump braggadocio. It was a teleprompter speech, but it was serious, studious, and it represented a solid understanding of issues and of the status quo.

The first play I did was 'Philadelphia Here I Come.' Can you imagine that? I am 37 years old I am doing my second professional play and I am on stage with John Malkovich. Joan Allen, Laurie Metcalf and Gary Sinise. One huge name after another. I was terrified and petrified, could hardly get a word out of my mouth.

When you compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, and to compare what people were subjected to there to what happened in Philadelphia - which was inappropriate, certainly that . . . to describe it in those terms I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risked all, for my people.

Our country today is at a stage in our foreign policy similar to that crucial point in our nation's early history when our Constitution was produced in Philadelphia.

It's amazing to be a Puerto Rican fighter, we have a great history of fighters. I say this all the time, 'I'm Puerto Rican, raised in Philadelphia so I got the best of both worlds. I got the Puerto Rican power and the Philly toughness. It comes a long way.

I should care about the education a child in Philadelphia, or Pittsburgh, or Erie, or Scranton received because if they didn't get a good education my life is diminished and all of our lives are enhanced if they get that good education. It is a shared enterprise and we need to recognize that.

I am the father of twin sons that were born in Philadelphia at Pennsylvania Hospital in 1983. They were 13 weeks premature. Gerry weighed 1 pound 14 ounces, and Zachary 1 pound 11 ounces. They were the first male twins to ever survive at Pennsylvania Hospital.

I'm a Buffalo wing magnet, a sandwich fanatic, a cheesesteak guy. But I'll only get a cheesesteak in Philadelphia. No one else does it right.

In the year 1857, passing through Washington on our return from the annual visit to Philadelphia, I had the distinguished honor of visiting a President for the first time.