new-york-city

"where are the women writers of the Harlem Renaissance being taught? Why did it take so long for Zora Neale Hurston to be reprinted?"

"White people in New York talk about Alabama as though they had no Harlem. To ignore what is happening in their own back yard is a great device on the part of the white people."

"I've walked through the streets in East Harlem, and people have said, "Dónde está los Young Lords?" Where did they go? People miss the Young Lords."

"About the time I was 17 and graduated from high school, I went to Harlem, and that was a most beautiful place where, fortunately for me, I came into, or rather, ran into, the hands of some wonderful people, people who formed an important part of the so-called Black Renaissance. They were people like Langston Hughes, Wally Thurmond, Bud Fisher, all really wonderful writers. I lived in the YMCA where you could rent a room for $2 a week and they put all the regular inhabitants up on the 11th floor. Among them were people like Charlie Drew, who became the developer of blood plasma, distinguished physicians, physics people, and biologists...I was right there in the middle of all of this action. I didn’t have to think up gags…The cartoons drew themselves ... I was more surprised than anyone when Brother Bootsie became a Harlem household celebrity, not only among the colored proletariat be among the literati as well...To really dig Brother Bootsie, his trials and tribulations, you’d have to see Harlem from the sidewalk. Everyone in Harlem had trials and tribulations because everyone was colored. Or almost everyone…But being colored, even in an enlightened northern burg like New York, could be a drag."

"I've never believed that the people really were willing and able to pay the price of integration. From a practical standpoint, anyone who looked at the Harlem area knew that the potential for integration per se was basically impossible unless there were some radically innovative things done. And those innovative things would not be acceptable to those who ran the school system, nor to communities, nor even to the people who call themselves supporters of integration."

"All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive."

"The girls of Stonewall siam: | I'll do the perm; | we don't wear underwear; | pubic hair shows! | The queens of the Siam village: | we always look at ourselves | let's do the perm, | because we are girls!"

"The last goal I set for myself was to find the Stonewall. The news of the battle against the police in C.E.1969 had affected us immensely. I wanted to ask a passerby to take a photo of me in front of the bar. I thought that one day, after I die, someone might find the photo and understand me a little better."

"Everyone has their own Stonewall legend."

"So Cosmo says you're fat? Well I ain't down with that! 'Cause your waist is small and your curves are kickin' and I'm thinkin' bout stickin'."

"Man of my dreams, are you out in Brooklyn grabbing a pizza?"

"Spread love; it's the Brooklyn way."

"[to Boss Tweed] Mulberry Street... and Worth... Cross and Orange... and Little Water. Each of the Five Points is a finger. When I close my hand it becomes a fist. And, anytime that I wish, I can turn it against you."

"Nicknamed 'Death's Thoroughfare', It was here, where the street crooks its elbow at the Five Points, that the streets and numerous alleys radiated in all directions, forming the foul core of the New York slums."

"People get bit by rats every day in this city."

"And that is a story that no one can beat, When I say that I saw it on Mulberry Street."

"What the fight was about to which I fell heir I have long since forgotten. Mulberry Street in those days was prone to such things. Somebody was always fighting somebody else for some fancied injury or act of bad faith in the gathering of the news... New York is a queer town. The grist of every hopper in the world comes to it."

"And so in my small way I'm a big man on Mulberry street I don't mean all day Only at night when I'm light on my feet But you know in my own heart I'm a big man on Mulberry street I play the whole part I leave a big tip with every receipt"

"The feast runs for 11 days, and you have until Sept. 21 to make it to Mulberry Street."

"Even old New York was once New Amsterdam. Why they changed it? I can't say, people just liked it better that way."

"I am no more a child, but a man; no longer a confederacy, but a nation. I am no more Virginia, New York, Carolina, or Massachusetts, but the United States of America."

"You come together today in St Thomas church in New York united in sorrow by the terrible events of last week. Each and every one of us has been shocked and numbed by what we have witnessed in these recent days. But none of us should doubt the resilience and determination of this great and much loved city and its people. Men and women from many nations, from many faiths and from many backgrounds were working together in New York City when this unimaginable outrage overtook them all."

"New York is the only real city-city."

"Boston is among an increasing number of municipalities, universities, and private foundations that have announced plans to divest from fossil fuels. In late October, ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, better known as COP26, Auckland, New Zealand; Copenhagen, Denmark; Glasgow, Scotland; Paris; Rio de Janeiro; and Seattle announced commitments to divest from fossil fuel companies and increase investments to make cities more sustainable. Also last month, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott signed a bill that requires the city’s three pension funds to divest from the fossil fuel industry. Those are in addition to divestment commitments made last year by Berlin; Bristol, England; Cape Town, South Africa; Durban, South Africa; London; Los Angeles; Milan; New Orleans; New York City; Oslo; Norway; Pittsburgh; and Vancouver, Canada. “Cities are at the forefront of tackling the climate emergency and there is real momentum to move investments away from fossil fuels and toward climate solutions,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is chair-elect of C40 Cities, a network of mayors working to confront climate change, said in a statement. “I will continue to encourage more cities to join the movement, and urge national governments and private finance institutions to mobilize more finance to invest directly in cities to support a green and fair recovery.”"

"I can't see heaven but I credit hell — I live in New York so I know it well."

"Of course, in Los Angeles, everything is based on driving, even the killings. In New York, most people don't have cars, so if you want to kill a person, you have to take the subway to their house. And sometimes on the way, the train is delayed and you get impatient, so you have to kill someone on the subway. That's why there are so many subway murders; no one has a car."

"Donald Trump has been uncommonly nice to Hillary and me. We're all New Yorkers. And I like him. And I love playing golf with him."

"We are all New Yorkers, just as surely as John F. Kennedy declared himself to be a Berliner in 1962 when he visited Berlin."

"New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and the perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live' at Xanadu."

"This is New York. We'll find a place to dance."

"The global role of the United States is perhaps the ultimate chapter in that long period of European expansion which had begun in western Europe, and especially on the Atlantic seaboard, during the 15th century. Europe slowly had outgrown its homeland. Its cultural empire eventually formed a long band traversing most of the Northern Hemisphere and dipping far into the Southern. The modern hub of the peoples and ideas of European origin is now New York as much as Paris, or Los Angeles as much as London. In the history of the European peoples the city of Washington is perhaps what Constantinople - the infant city of Emperor Constantine - was to the last phase of the Roman Empire; for it is unlikely that Europeans, a century hence, will continue to stamp the world so decisively with their ideas and inventions."

"Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across thousands of high walls, the fearful cry of a too-well-known voice finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island of un-reality."

"What is to be said of leaders with the mental acuity and moral perceptions revealed by these disclosed words and deeds? They are at best enemies of life without understanding. Psychologically, they disconnect all feeling for the beauty of the planet — a rose, an impala in motion, a baby’s hand, a Confucian analect, a Bach cantata, a parable of Jesus, pilgrims bathing in the Ganges, a crowd watching a soccer game in Rio, the subway in Moscow, the skyline in Manhattan. They cannot think or feel about the human meaning of what they do.,, A single Trident II submarine can inflict more death than all prior wars in history. Twenty-four missiles, launched while submerged, each with seventeen independently targeted, maneuverable nuclear warheads five times more powerful than the atom bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, can travel 5,000 nautical miles to strike within 300 feet of 408 predetermined targets. Nuclear winter might follow even if no other weapons are used."

"New York, the capital of neuroticism"

"A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe."

"Leave us alone, or else expect us in New York and Washington."

"New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make a sudden move."

"I had a chance to visit America in August 2014. To be honest, I didn't love New York City because it was too crowded, hectic, and flamboyant. But I absolutely loved other parts of America I visited. They felt like paradise to me. If I could speak English and if U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would allow me to immigrate to America, I would live in the U.S. rather than South Korea. I don't know if it will ever happen."

"You don't have to be born in New York City to be a New Yorker. You have to live here for six months. And if at the end of the six months you walk faster, you talk faster, you think faster, you're a New Yorker."

"I'll give you another example of what I'm talking about. We've traveled extensively in the United States, and our son often travels with us, and when he does we always try to arrange to have one of those folding beds for him in our hotel room. Beth always calls the hotel in advance and asks them to please write down that we want a folding bed. She calls later to confirm that there will be a folding bed. When we check in, we always remind them that we need a folding bed. So needless to say, there has never- not once, in ten years, in dozens and dozens of hotels- been an actual folding bed in our room when we got there. We always have to call Housekeeping tto ask for it, and nothing happens, so we call again, and maybe again, and of course Housekeeping is not happy about this- These damned guests! Always calling Housekeeping and requesting Housekeeping services!"- and then finally, often late at night, our folding bed will be brought to us by a person who is obviously annoyed about having to deliver beds in the middle of the night to people who should have thought of this earlier. Naturally, I always give this person a tip. In Japan, the bed was always there, at every hotel, when we checked in. This may seem minor to you, but to us it was a miracle, comparable in scope to having a total stranger hold a door open for you in New York City."

"The only reason I wouldn't go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump."

"Back in about 1753 it took a letter three days to go from New York City to Washington, and today you can go from here to China in less time than that... Man's scientific genius has been amazing."

"A certified geezer is also freer to express displeasure. Once I was walking in midtown Manhattan at rush hour, and I came to a massive traffic jam, horns honking everywhere, and right in the middle of a major intersection, the center of the whole mess, was a taxi driver honking at a very elderly man who was standing directly in front of the cab, blocking its path, and hitting it with his umbrella. WHAP the umbrella would go, on the hood. Then, very slowly, the elderly man would raise it into the air, over his head, where it would waver for a second and then... WHAP it would come down on the hood again. I stopped to watch, along with a large crowd of New Yorkers, who have an inbred genetic hatred of taxi drivers and who cheered louder with every WHAP. Nobody made any effort to move the elderly man out of the way. He was doing exactly what we'd all wanted to do a million times, but we couldn't because we'd get run over or arrested. I finally had to leave, but I like to think that the reason New York traffic is always so screwed up is that the elderly man is still in that intersection, whapping away. So for my money, geezerhood is definitely the way to go. In fact, you might want to start practicing right now."

"Cities like London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, or Glasgow are high spots of slavery in comparison to Albania, Bulgaria, or even Central Africa. The slavery of the watch and clock, the bourgeois, anthropocentric slavery of material prestige and successful competition (to slave in order to keep up standards), the wage slavery of the proletarian, the school slavery of the children, the conscription slavery of the adolescents, the road slavery, the factory slavery, the barrack slavery, the party slavery, the office slavery, the parlor slavery of manners and conventions — all these slaveries make political "freedom" appear a bitter joke."

"These people were of all races, colors, and creeds. French were in the north and in the Carolinas. Dutch had built the town on Manhattan island, and their patroons' estates in the Hudson valley; now they were building their own cabins in the Mohawk Indian country that is now New York State. Germans had settled in the Jerseys and in the far west, beyond Philadelphia. Germans and Scotch-Irish were climbing the Carolina mountains; Swedes were in Delaware, English and French and Dutch and Irish were settled in Massachusetts, the New Hampshire Grants, Connecticut, and Virginia. Mingled with all these were Italians, Portuguese, Finns, Arabs, Armenians, Russians, Greeks, and Africans from a dozen very different African peoples and cultures. Black, brown, yellow and white, all these peoples were some of them free and some of them slaves. Also they were intermarried with the American Indians."

"When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough."

"Nothing remains static in New York City."

"Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life."

"You know what’s great about New York? The threshold for citizenship as a New Yorker is actually pretty short. If you come to New York and you still like it two years after you arrived here, and you still think it’s great and you’re having a good time and you haven’t been just totally ground down and go limping back to wherever the fuck you came from, you know what? You’re in!"

"Scientific progress over the past years has been amazing. Man through his scientific genius has been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains, so that today it's possible to eat breakfast in New York City and supper in London."