Mark Twain
Writer, Humorist
"In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents?"
Boston quotes
Boston
322 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Adelle Davis
Nutritionist
"To say that obesity is caused by merely consuming too many calories is like saying that the only cause of the American Revolution was the Boston Tea Party."
Tracy Kidder
Author
"Paul Farmer has helped to build amazing health care system in one of the poorest areas of Haiti. He founded Partners in Health, which serves the destitute and the sick in many parts of the world from Haiti to Boston and from Russia to Peru."
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Justice, Jurist, Author
"It takes me several days, after I get back to Boston, to realize that the reference "the president" refers to the president of Harvard and not to a minor official in Washington."
Eli Roth
Filmmaker
"You know, I'm from Boston, and in Boston, you are born with a baseball bat in your hand."
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Boston quotes (page 1 of 17)
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"From the windows of my office in Boston ... I can see the Golden Stairs from Boston Harbor where all eight of my great-grandparents set foot on this great land for the first time. That immigrant spirit of limitless possibility animates America even today."
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"The most dramatic case is that of the Central Americans. Why are people fleeing Central America? It's because of the atrocities the U.S. committed there. Take Boston, where there's a fairly large Mayan population. These people are fleeing from the highlands of Guatemala, where there was virtual genocide in the early 1980s backed by Ronald Reagan. The region was devastated, and people are still fleeing to this day, yet they're sent back."
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"The Irish were treated horribly, even here in Boston. For example, in the late nineteenth century they were treated pretty much like African Americans. You could find signs here in Boston in the restaurants saying "No dogs and Irish.""
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"Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles."
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"At a Boston signing, someone from the audience asked why I was so obsessed with furniture in my books. The question rattled around in my head. I had no idea that I was obsessed with furniture."
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"If you rise in life, you have to behave in a certain way. You can go to a strip club if you're a beer-swilling sand shoveler, but if you're the Bishop of Boston, you shouldn't go."
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"Some Argentines, without means, do it, People say, in Boston , even beans do it. Let's do it, let's fall in love ."
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"The Jews believed Jerusalem to be the centre. I have seen a kratometric chart designed to show that the city of Philadelphia was in the same thermic belt, and, by inference, in the same belt of empire, as the cities of Athens, Rome, and London. It was drawn by a patriotic Philadelphian, and was examined with pleasure, under his showing, by the inhabitants of Chestnut Street. But, when carried to Charleston, to New Orleans, and to Boston, it somehow failed to convince the ingenious scholars of all those capitals."
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"When Boston and Orlando told me they were going to pick me at 21 and 22, I figured I don't need to do a workout for a second -round team. Boston and Orlando never drafted me because they said I was too skinny and no European point guard will make it in the League."
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"The distinction that Jews have themselves always made between Jews of German origin and Jews of East European origin is as stringent as that between Boston Brahmin and Boston lace-curtain Irish, though much finer."
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"It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London."
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"We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors."
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"I don't know what started me, I just wrote poetry from the time was quite small. I guess I liked nursery rhymes and I guess I thought I could do the same thing. I wrote my first poem, my first published poem, when I was eight-and-a-half years old. It came out in The Boston Traveller and from then on, I suppose, I've been a bit of a professional."
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"A solid man of Boston; A comfortable man with dividends, And the first salmon and the first green peas."
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"Boston has carried the practice of hypocrisy to the n-th degree of refinement, grace, and failure."
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"Both my parents came from Russia and suddenly they wound up in Boston, Massachusetts, Brookline, Massachusetts and they felt the sun rose and set on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's backside because he meant so much to them. This was freedom. This was something totally different from the Russia they had left."
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"I started out as the president of a small college in Minnesota in 1947. And I had five years of experience at the college. Then we went to Los Angeles. And the press got to what we were doing. And I went to Boston, which is my next series of meetings. That was in 1950."
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"I wasn't going to toss off words like love and forever until I was sure. Until he was sure. Forever can be a very long time for a n=Bean sidhes, ans so far his track record looked more like the fifty-yard dash than the Boston marathon."
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"If the Pilgrims had landed in Santa Monica Bay rather than Boston, we'd have six states out here!"
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"Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience - 4000 critics."
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