cities-and-towns-in-england

"If ever there was one player, anywhere in the world, that was made for Manchester United, it was Cantona. He swaggered in, stuck his chest out, raised his head and surveyed everything as though he were asking: ‘I’m Cantona. How big are you? Are you big enough for me?'"

"Sarcasm is a Manchester trait."

"For Manchester is the place where people do things… ‘Don’t talk about what you are going to do, do it.’ That is the Manchester habit. And in the past through the manifestation of this quality the word Manchester became a synonym for energy and freedom and the right to do and to think without shackles."

"On derby day in Manchester, the city is cut in two. The Blues and the Reds invade the streets, and if your team wins the city belongs to you."

"Noel Gallagher: The thing about Manchester is… it all comes from here"

"By the 18th century, Manchester had become a global powerhouse. The Bridgewater Canal (1761), the first modern canal in Britain, was hailed as the 'eighth wonder of the world'"

"Our relationship with other bands in Manchester wasn’t great. We would run into Joy Division but we weren’t really mates. We didn’t mix."

"A city that thinks a table is for dancing on."

"Manchester kids have the best record collections."

"At Manchester United we strive for perfection and if we fail we might just have to settle for excellence."

"When the band started we wrote depressing songs. Living in Manchester you couldn’t help but sound like Joy Division, the city had a depressing atmosphere."

"Manchester’s got everything except a beach."

"And on the sixth day God created Manchester"

"This is Manchester, we do things differently here."

"Manchester is in the south of the north of England. Its spirit has a contrariness in it – a south and north bound up together – at once untamed and unmetropolitan; at the same time, connected and wordly."

"I had no idea that any of us could play as well as we did on Morning Glory. I hoped we could, but I didn’t know. The whole of the first album is about escape. It’s about getting away from the shitty, boring life of Manchester."

"We like annoying people. It’s a Manchester thing. It’s a trait. We just like pissing people off."

"Manchester has pure life packed into its bare brick warehouses, ironically sunny-themed trams, and even its old railway lines which are now adorned with blooming gardens."

"Manchester changed the world’s politics: from vegetarianism to feminism to trade unionism to communism, every upstart notion that ever got ideas above its station, every snotty street-fighter of a radical philosophy, was fostered brawling in Manchester’s streets, mills, pubs, churches and debating halls."

"If it stopped banging on about its football teams and its bands and its shops and its attitude, Manchester has something that it can be genuinely, enormously proud of, something that it should shout from the rooftops."

"Factory Records were not just made in the north. They were entirely, fundamentally, immanently of the north. They sounded like the north, and Manchester in particular, made into sound."

"Making money didn’t seem that relevant. It wasn’t at the forefront of what was important."

"It wasn’t your greasy, beer-stained 1970s club, it was a slice of New York in Manchester."

"You arrive at the building to a very minimal sign, then, in the entrance, you pass through doors that had 5 and 1 cut out of them"

"Over the moor, take me to the moor Dig a shallow grave and I'll lay me down Over the moor, take me to the moor Dig a shallow grave and I'll lay me down Lesley Anne and your pretty white beads Oh, John, you'll never be a man And you'll never see your home again Oh, Manchester, so much to answer for"

"The Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine, nicknamed Baby, was the first computer to store and run a program from memory, just like most computers today."

"Manchester has its own pride and London has its sort of pride and sometimes we can be a bit mean to each other, but I think if we dig the music we can get on really well"

"The old mayor climb’d the belfry tower, The ringers ran by two, by three; ‘Pull, if ye never pull’d before; Good ringers, pull your best,’ quoth he. ‘Play uppe, play uppe, O Boston bells! Ply all your changes, all your swells, Play uppe “The Brides of Enderby.”’"

"Solid men of Boston, make no long orations; Solid men of Boston, drink no long potations; Solid men of Boston, go to bed at sundown; Never lose your way like the loggerheads of London."

"Solid men of Boston, banish long potations! Solid men of Boston, make no long orations!"

"The Ladies Temple is also finished, with which I cannot say we are much delighted. In the view of it is lately erected a naval pillar in honour of Captain Grenville, on the Top stands a figure of Neptune with a splinter of the ship in his hands, and on the base of the pillar is inscribed in great encomiums on this unfortunate young man."

"That side of the Garden first finish'd is so Crowded with Buildings that as you see them at a distance seem almost at Top of One Another that each loses its Effect. They are all small and trifling or clumsy, and are all dirty and decaying already."

"I went to my Lady Cobham yesterday and she began in a violent manner about the Sheep being put into the garden. I told her they look'd mighty pretty and everybody said it wou'd make the turf much firmer, but if they did harm they would be taken out I suppos'd ..."

"Chichester is not in itself sacred, nor pleasant, nor fragrant to the nostrils. On the contrary, I am here always conscious of an odour not easily described."

"The overall range of trade goods which left the European ports of , , and Liverpool was determined almost exclusively by the pattern of production and consumption within Europe. From the beginning, Europe assumed the power to make decisions within the international trading system. An excellent illustration of that is the fact that the so-called international law which governed the conduct of nations on the high seas was nothing else but European law. Africans did not participate in its making, and in many instances, African people were simply the victims, for the law recognized them only as transportable merchandise. If the African slave was thrown overboard at sea, the only legal problem that arose was whether or not the slave ship could claim compensation from the insurers! Above all, European decision-making power was exercised in selecting what Africa should export—in accordance with European needs."

"I first joined the Labour party in Liverpool because of what I saw of the poverty, the unemployment, and the endless infamies committed on the inhabitants of the back-streets of that city. I am horrified that the threat of unemployment and economic misery is now being deployed against the same kind of people once again."

"In my Liverpool home, in my Liverpool home We speak with an accent exceedingly rare Meet under a statue exceedingly bare And if you want a Cathedral, we've got one to spare In my Liverpool home."

"Liverpool, like no other city, concentrated simultaneously on all the core functions of the global cotton trade. Its merchants traded raw cotton, shipped cotton goods, and financed both cotton agriculture and cotton manufacturing. Other cotton cities were more specialized in their activities. Merchants in New Orleans, Alexandria, and Bombay, for example, mastered the export of raw cotton, while Bremen and Le Havre merchants received their shipments. New York and London merchants focused on financing the trade. And widely dispersed merchants in cities from Buenos Aires to Recife, Hamburg to Calcutta received shipments of yarn and cloth and distributed them through their hinterlands. None of these cities, however, competed seriously with Liverpool."

"If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? -- not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?"

"Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge."

"Living in Cambridge, with nature and everything, it's so clean."

"You will feel interested to know the fate of my mathematical speculations in Cambridge. One of the papers is already printed in the Mathematical Journal. Another, which I sent a short time ago, has been very favourably received, and will shortly be printed together with one I had previously sent."

"There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'"

"The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything."

"I ran out in the morning when the air was clean and new, And all the grass was glittering and grey with autumn dew; I ran out to the apple-tree and pull’d an apple down, And all the bells were ringing in the grey old town.Down in the town off the bridges and the grass They are sweeping up the leaves to let the people pass,— Sweeping up the old leaves, golden-reds and browns, Whilst the men go to lecture with the wind in their gowns."

"I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word."

"Cambridge has seen many strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk, it has seen Porson sober. I am a greater scholar than Wordsworth and I am a greater poet than Porson. So I fall betwixt and between"

"Cambridge was the place for someone from the Colonies or the Dominions to go on to, and it was to the Cavendish Laboratory that one went to do physics."

"I did have a certain frustration about how the world was. I still don't like authority exercised without reason. But they laugh at you at Cambridge if you say that sort of thing. For them, the law is a system of rules not that different from mathematics. It's not your business to say what's right and wrong - you just apply the rules on one side or the other. It doesn't matter which."

"To put it in somewhat drastic terms, Cambridge in the thirties was characterised by two things: a craze for communism and a craze for homosexuality."