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New York City

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New York: where everyone mutinies but no one deserts. ~ Harry Hershfield
New York, I love you. But, you're bringing me down. Like a rat in a cage, pulling minimum wage. ~ LCD Soundsystem
If I can make it there, I'm going to make it anywhere! It's up to you, New York! New York! ~ Frank Sinatra

New York City, officially known as New York, is the largest city of the United States by population, with 8.6 million residents in 2016. It was settled in 1613 by Dutch and originally called New Amsterdam. New York is popularly known as the "Big Apple", "Gotham City", "Empire City", "Fun City", "The Naked City", and the "City That Never Sleeps". Manhattan Island is often referred to as "The City" by New Yorkers, despite being only one part of the city itself.

New York City was originally founded by Dutch colonists led by Peter Minuit, and was later annexed by the British Empire. It was occupied by the British Army for most of the American Revolution. It then served as the provisional national capital of the United States during George Washington’s presidency. During the 19th century it became a primary destination for immigrants to the United States, and grew into the largest city in the country.

New York is often referred to as "the Capital of the World", due to its size, wealth, centrality to the global financial system, and for its hosting of the United Nations organization headquarters. Its municipal government is currently controlled by the Democratic Party, and its current mayor is Eric Adams.


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Quotes

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Sorted alphabetically by author or source
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. ~ Ed Koch
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. ~ Albert Camus
New York is the only real city-city. ~ Truman Capote
These streets will make you feel brand new. Big lights will inspire you, let's hear it for New York. New York, New York. ~ Shawn Carter
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. ~ Elizabeth II
You're allowed to silently appreciate it, but you have to be cool. From what I can tell, that's the whole point of New York: being cool. I'm not cool. ~ Becky Albertalli & Adam Silvera

A

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  • The idea to make New York City a state, in case you didn't know, is not original with me. There's been a long struggle for more "home rule," which, although it hasn't focused on statehood, has sought to get us more control over taxes, services and decision-making. Statehood was first proposed by the Mayor of New York in 1861; it was later advocated by such people as William Randolph Hearst and by William F. Buckley in his campaign for Mayor in 1965. Most people, however, will remember the statehood idea as it was first put forth in Norman Mailer's campaign for Mayor in 1969. He gave the idea some pzazz, but not enough people took it seriously.
    • Bella Abzug Bella!: Ms. Abzug Goes to Washington (1972)
  • The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.
  • There are so many unspoken rules when you live here, like the way you're never supposed to stop in the middle of the sidewalk or stare dreamily up at tall buildings or pause to read graffiti. No giant folding maps, no fanny packs, no eye contact. No humming songs from Dear Evan Hansen in public. And you're definitely not supposed to take selfies at street corners, even if there's a hot dog stand and a whole line of yellow taxis in the background, which is eerily how you always pictured New York. You're allowed to silently appreciate it, but you have to be cool. From what I can tell, that's the whole point of New York: being cool. I'm not cool.
    • Becky Albertalli & Adam Silvera, What If It's Us (New York: HarperTeen, 2018), p. 3
  • I get a certain pleasure in knowing that I live not merely in a city but in Manhattan, the center of New York City, a region so unique in many ways that I honestly believe that Earth is divided into halves: Manhattan and non-Manhattan.

B

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  • New York is the only city in the world where you can get deliberately run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.
  • I've a distrust of big cities. I've a distrust of New York which is my big city. Why?... Well, because I was born there, grew up there. My experience of it, after all, it is pretty gloomy; and it is too big. It is one of the loneliest places in the world.
    • 1965 in Conversations with James Baldwin, edited by Fred R. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (1989)
  • "The Empire State" is of course dominated by New York City, the "Big Apple," filled with the bustle and excitement of millions of energetic, sophisticated, urbane people experiencing numerous only-in-New-York thrills such as making it all the way to work without getting peed on. As Frank Sinatra put it in his immortal and dynamic rendering of New York's Official Horrendously Overexposed Hit Show Tune, "New York, New York,"
    "If I can make it there,
    I can afford to move to Stamford, Connecticut."
    • Dave Barry, Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need (1991), New York: Fawcett Columbine, p. 90
  • Here are some tips for getting maximum enjoyment from your trip to New York:
    1. Cancel it immediately.
    Ha ha! We are just kidding, of course. New York is in fact a major tourist destination, drawing millions of visitors each year, the majority of whom are never robbed and stabbed and left on the sidewalk to bleed to death while being stepped over by enough people to populate the entire state of Montana. Their secret? They follow certain common-sense New York City safety rules, such as:
    Always walk at least 30 miles per hour.
    Always keep your money and other valuables in a safe place, such as Switzerland.
    Avoid unsafe areas, such as your hotel bathroom.
    Never make eye contact. This is asking to be mugged. In the New York court system, a mugger is automatically declared not guilty if the defense can prove that the victim has a history of making eye contact.
    • Dave Barry, Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need (1991), New York: Fawcett Columbine, p. 91
  • Getting around New York is easy, thanks to the convenient and simple subway system. The major lines are the IRT, the BMT, the SAT, the LSD, and QED, which operate crosstown, midtown, downtown, thrutown, and camptown trains that are local and quasi-express only with alternating stations northbound between 59th Street and the corner of Twelfth Avenue and Grant's Tomb only on Wednesdays except during lobster season or for those passengers holding odd-numbered transfers and claiming more than 8.5 percent of their gross net deductible pretax noninterest income as medical expenses. If you have any questions about this, helpful attendants inside bullet-proof bomb-proof flame-proof machete-proof token-dispensing bunkers will be more than happy to continue reading the New York Post no matter how loud you yell. Or for equal convenience you can take a taxi, which you get by simply raising your hand and then bringing it down sharply on the heads of the various New Yorkers who will try to leap into the taxi ahead of you. Be sure to speak very clearly to the driver, as he probably just arrived from a Third World nation where the major form of transportation is vines. The standard tip for everything in New York City is a smile and a bright, shiny quarter.
    New York State is completely different.
    • Dave Barry, Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need (1991), New York: Fawcett Columbine, p. 91-92
  • 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.
    • Dave Barry, Dave Barry Turns 40 (1990). New York: Crown Publishers, p. 176-177
  • 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.
    • Dave Barry, Dave Barry Does Japan (1992), p. 48-49
  • Two invasive species in particular have caused serious concern: Burmese pythons, and New Yorkers. The New Yorkers have been coming for years, which is weird because pretty much all they do once they get to Florida is bitch about how everything here sucks compared to the earthly paradise that is New York. They continue to root, loudly, for the Jets, the Knicks, the Mets, and the Yankees; they never stop declaring, loudly, that in New York the restaurants are better, the stores are nicer, the people are smarter, the public transportation is free of sharks, etc. The Burmese pythons are less obnoxious, but just as alarming in their own way. These are snakes that started out as pets of Miami residents, until one day these residents stopped smoking crack and said, "Jesus H. Christ! We're living with a giant snake!"
    • Dave Barry, I'll Mature When I'm Dead (2010), p. 84-85
  • Nothing remains static in New York City.
    • Pura Belpré "My Work in the Children's Room" in The Stories I Read to the Children: The Life and Writing of Pura Belpré by Lisa Sánchez González (2013)
  • Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.
  • 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.
  • 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!
  • I can't see heaven but I credit hell —
    I live in New York so I know it well.
    • John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (1968), the happening world (6): "Street Seen"

C

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  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

D

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  • 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.

E

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  • 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.
    • Elizabeth II , Message from the Queen, read by the British ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, St Thomas's Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue in New York City. 22 September 2001. [2] Source 1: The Telegraph (September 21, 2001): Grief is price of love, says the Queen. By David Sapsted, Peter Foster and George Jones in New York. Archived from the original on July 7, 2013 and January 25, 2023. and Source 2: The Guardian (September 21, 2021): Text of the Queen's message to New York. Archived from the original on February 2, 2023 and May 17, 2023.

F

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  • New York, the capital of neuroticism

G

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  • So now we come to New York City, the incomparable, the brilliant star city of parodies, the forty-ninth state, a law unto itself, the Cyclopean paradox, the inferno with no out-of-bounds, the supreme expression of both the miseries and the splendors of contemporary civilization, the Macedonia of the United States. It meets the most severe test that may be applied to definition of a metropolis- it stays up all night. But also it becomes a small town when it rains. Paradox? New York is at once the climactic synthesis of America, and yet the negation of American in that it has so many characteristics called un-American. One friend of mine, indignant that it seems impossible for any American city to develop on the pattern of Paris or Vienna, always says that Manhattan is like Constantinople- not the Instanbul of old Stamboul but of the Pera or Levantine side. He meant not merely the trite fact that New York is polygot, but that it is full of people, like the Levantines, who are interested basically in only two things, living well and making money. I would prefer a different analogy- that only Instanbul, of all the cities in the world, has as enchanting and stimulating a profile.
  • New York is the publishing center of the nation; it is the art, theater, musical, ballet, operatic center; it is the opinion center; it is the radio center; it is the style center. Hollywood? Hollywood is nothing more than a suburb of the Bronx, both financially and from a view of talent. Politically, socially, in the world of ideas and in the whole world of entertainment, which is a great American industry needless to say, New York sets the tone and pace of the entire nation. What books 140 million Americans will read is largely determined by New York reviewers. Most of the serious newspaper columns originate in or near New York; so do most of the gossip columns, which condition Americans from Mobile to Puget Sound to the same patterns of social behavior. In a broad variety of fields, from serous drama to what you will hear on a jukebox, it is what New York says that counts; New York Opinion is the hallmark of both intellectual and material success; to be accepted in this nation, New York acceptance must come first. I do not assert that this is necessarily a good thing. I say merely that it is true. One reason for all this is that New York, with its richly cosmopolitan population, provides such an appreciative audience. It admires artistic quality. It has a fine inward gleam for talent. Also New York is a wonderfully opulent center for bogus culture. One of its chief industries might be said to be the manufacture of reputations, many of them fraudulent.

H

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  • Where I come from, the rules were relatively simple... Don't look for trouble, because in New York you can always find it. But don't back off either.
  • I was raised in what is now the "jungle" of New York, the lower Bronx, and, indeed, at that time it was a very pleasant place. We played like all other kids. Where I lived was a very small enclave, a ghetto, but there were a number of ghettos. Most of the people there were immigrants; first generation Americans from Italy, Ireland, Poland, and there were a few French people. In a way, in a peculiar way, it was an integrated community composed of several separated ghettos. That was about the norm in those days. The idea of integration hadn't really gotten started, so I think that for anyone living today it would be a period that would be really difficult to understand...it was...in spite of some of the racism which I began to learn in school, a rather pleasant life.
  • New York: where everyone mutinies but no one deserts.
  • I used to love to call L.A. when I lived in New York. "What're y'all doin'? Talkin' to TV producers, huh? Bummer. Me? I'm readin' a book! Yeah, we're thinkin' back East! Yeah, we're evolving. Is that "The Big One" I hear in the background? Bye, you lizard scum, bye!

J

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Welcome to the jungle. New York, New York. ~ Curtis J. Jackson
Panic in Wall Street, brokers feeling melancholy. ~ Scott Joplin
  • Take New York, the dynamic metropolis. What makes New York so special? It's the invitation of the Statue of Liberty, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses who yearn to breathe free." Not restricted to English only. Many people, many cultures, many languages - with one thing in common, they yearn to breathe free. Common ground!
  • New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.
    • Henry James, Selected Letters of Henry James, Edited by Leon Edel
  • New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face, and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments,--constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther. And all these become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns to a fate like that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune; then with a sudden breath she blows the bubbles out and laughs mockingly as she watches them fall.
  • The only reason I wouldn't go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump.

K

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  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Ed Koch, interview ("What Makes a New Yorker"), New York: A Documentary Film.

L

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  • When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.
  • New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make a sudden move.
  • Traffic signals in New York are just rough guidelines.

M

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  • You're not from New York, are you? You can't be from New York. Well, when I broke in, I didn't know many people by name so I would just say, "Say, hey," and the writers picked that up. The writers here in New York can make anything happen, so they made that happen.
  • In New York, constantly, the street is challenging you to relate to it.
  • I consider New York my home. I love being in the island, of course, and I get great nourishment from its beauty, culture, food, and good friends. But my heart is in Nueva York, where I was born. When one is born into a city with such an immense diversity, one can take advantage of that richness…That's the magic of New York. People come from all over. I feel a citizen of the world. I'm not really a Nationalist. I'm very fortunate; I can embrace any culture in the world and feel quite at home. That's a joy for me. New York gave me a sense of belonging that is not constricted by nationalism.

N

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Futurist thinkers have rarely been kind to New York City. In fact, writers and artists have spent the better part of two centuries destroying the Big Apple. Whether by flood or fire, nuclear explosion or alien invasion, New York more than any other city bears the brunt of our most apocalyptic futures. ~ Matt Novak
  • People come to New York to live in small apartments, after living in large homes elsewhere. They think they will never get used to it. How will they live without their stuff (now in storage, or disposed of)? Very soon, they realize they have more than enough stuff in the apartment.
  • New York arguably boasts the most diverse population of any major city in the world because of the flow of immigrants from across the globe.

P

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It came to be the symbol of the city — not just the American city, but the city itself — with skyscrapers in the early 20th century. It remains the most important American city despite the rise of Chicago at one point, and Los Angeles and D.C. At least for economics and for culture, New York is still the capital and has been, really from the 1830s onward. ~ Max Page
The best thing for New York might be the sight of King Kong tramping through the streets of Manhattan on his way to a fateful appointment at the top of the Empire State Building,” Mr. Page wrote. “For if there is one thing that symbolizes New York’s pre-eminence, it is that so many still want to imagine the city’s end. ~ Max Page
The most fabulous city in the world. ~ Ji-woo Park
One thing l love about New York City is its diversity. There are different people from all over the globe sharing their culture and building their communities. For example, New York’s Chinatown is the largest Chinese community in the western hemisphere. ~ Ji-woo Park
I bow my head to the victims of terrorism. I am highly impressed of the courage of New York residents. The great city and the great American nation are to win! ~ Vladimir V. Putin
  • The best thing for New York might be the sight of King Kong tramping through the streets of Manhattan on his way to a fateful appointment at the top of the Empire State Building,” Mr. Page wrote. “For if there is one thing that symbolizes New York’s pre-eminence, it is that so many still want to imagine the city’s end.
  • One thing I love about New York City is its diversity. There are different people from all over the globe sharing their culture and building their communities. For example, New York's Chinatown is the largest Chinese community in the western hemisphere.
  • I really wanted to stay in New York City longer. I have been missing my life in New York City. One thing that I missed about it is the food. I really enjoyed Mexican and Indian food in New York City. I went to Chipotle at least twice a week when I was there. Brown rice with chicken was my favorite. If dark green guacamole was on top of the rice it could not have been better. There was an Indian restaurant near my school so I went there many times. When it served lunch (from 12-3 p.m.), the price per person was only $12, including tips and taxes. It was the cheapest Indian restaurant I had ever been to. The good news was that its food was as good as its prices. I feel so depressed when I think of and talk about the food I had in New York City. I will not be able to try them again until I go back to the States... One thing I have discovered is life in Seoul is much more difficult and stressful than in New York City. South Korea is a small country, but it is incredibly strong. The secret is competition. Everybody competes with each other in order to attain their goals. They work so hard that they almost never go home before 10 p.m. during the weekdays. University students, for example, would register for TOEIC or TOEFL classes even before the summer and winter vacations come. The library is full of students now even though it is summer vacation. Every student is studying something. If they did not do anything, they would feel insecure and left behind. Although New York City is viewed as one of the most bustling and busy cities in the world, what I had noticed was that New Yorkers had more room to be relaxed and do whatever they wanted. It is true that their society is really competitive, but they do not really force themselves to win every time they compete.
  • I realized that my gloss as chief economist, head of Economics and Regional Planning... was part of a sinister system aimed not at outfoxing an unsuspecting customer, but rather at promoting the most subtle and effective form of imperialism the world has ever known.... The march had begun and it was rapidly encircling the planet. The hoods had discarded their leather jackets, dressed up in business suits, and taken on an air of respectability. Men and women were descending from corporate headquarters in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, and Tokyo, streaming across every continent to convince corrupt politicians to allow their countries to be shackled to the corporatocracy, and to induce desperate people to sell their bodies to sweatshops and assembly lines... a world of smoke and mirrors intended to keep us all shackled to a system that is morally repugnant and ultimately self-destructive.
  • I lived in NYC twice, the last time for seven years. What I saw was not delightful: the increasing ownership of the city by the ruling class, the poor and finally also the middle class being pushed out, terrifying police work (believe me, the Red Squad were no philanthropists), real estate prices from hell. Pollution.

R

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I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? ~ Ayn Rand
Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window? No, I don't feel how small I am. But, I feel that if a war came to threaten this? I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body. ~ Ayn Rand
  • That particular sense of sacred rapture men say they experience in contemplating nature- I've never received it from nature, only from. Buildings, Skyscrapers. I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pest-hole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.
  • They're building armoured skyscrapers in New York, every flat costs 100 billions euros. We're going towards a new middle-age: there'll be fortresses with rich chinese, russians, indians, arabians, americans inside, while the rest of the world will live in a new dark age.
  • Living in California adds ten years to a man's life. And those extra ten years I'd like to spent in New York.
    • Harry Ruby, reported in Rand Lindsly's Quotations.
  • New York, N.Y. is a challenge. Youth comes here to accept the challenge. I've had a running love affair with this town ever since I first saw her as a child. I'd rather sink here than swim anywhere else.

S

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Mr. Smith said that at the Empire State Building, airships like the Graf, almost 800 feet long, would “swing in the breeze and the passengers go down a gangplank”; seven minutes later they would be on the street. ~ Alfred E. Smith
Visitors to places like New York are amazed to see the way in which Serbs and Croatians, Sikhs and Hindus, Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, Jews and Palestinians, all seem to work and live together in harmony. How is this possible when these same groups are spearing each other and burning each other's homes in so many places in the world? ~ Dinesh D'Souza
Manhattan today is the result of the people who built it. ~ Dinesh D'Souza
  • New York is a woman, holding, according to history, a rag called liberty with one hand, and strangling the earth with the other.
    • Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Said (pseudonym Adunis) in "The Funeral of New York".
  • When its 100 degrees in New York, its 78 in Los Angeles. When its 10 degrees in New York, its 78 in Los Angeles. There are two million interesting people in New York. There are 78 in Los Angeles.
  • In late 1929, Alfred E. Smith, the leader of a group of investors erecting the Empire State Building, announced that they were increasing the height of the building to 1,250 feet from 1,050. Mr. Smith, a past governor of New York, denied that competition with the 1,046-foot-high Chrysler Building was a factor. “We are measuring its rise by principles of economic investment rather than spectacular standards,” he told The New York Times.
    The extra 200 feet, it was announced, was to serve as a mooring mast for dirigibles so that they could dock in Midtown, rather than out in Lakehurst, N.J., the station used by the German Graf Zeppelin. Mr. Smith said that at the Empire State Building, airships like the Graf, almost 800 feet long, would “swing in the breeze and the passengers go down a gang-plank”; seven minutes later they would be on the street.
  • New York is baffling in that it's a city that prides itself on being an absolute shithole. It's like — there's nothing good here, people are proud of that, they're happy, 'Oh, it's overpriced, and it's overpopulated, and it stinks like piss, and comics! — comics film specials here!' And they all open with a joke about, 'Yeah, you spend 8 thousand dollars a month for 9 square feet!' And you go, 'Well, why do you fucking live here?' Why do people stay here?.. But unfortunately, this is where comedy works — where people are the most miserable.
  • Sometimes I get bored riding down the beautiful streets of L.A. I know it sounds crazy, but I just want to go to New York and see people suffer.

T

[edit]
  • And just so — if I could, because he insulted a lot of people. I've had more calls on that statement that Ted made — New York is a great place. It's got great people, it's got loving people, wonderful people. When the World Trade Center came down, I saw something that no place on Earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York. You had two one hundred, you had two 110-story buildings come crashing down. I saw them come down. Thousands of people killed, and the cleanup started the next day, and it was the most horrific cleanup, probably in the history of doing this, and in construction. I was down there, and I've never seen anything like it. And the people in New York fought and fought and fought, and we saw more death, and even the smell of death — nobody understood it. And it was with us for months, the smell, the air. And we rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everybody in the world watched and everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers. And I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.
City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automatism, its streets a triumph of cubism [...] more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age. ~ Leon Trotsky
  • City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automatism, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.
    • Leon Trotsky, My Life, 1930. Baron, Joseph L., ed (1956). A Treasury of Jewish Quotations. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.. p. 332. 

U

[edit]
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. ~ John Updike
  • The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

W

[edit]
The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. ~ E.B. White
No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky. ~ E.B. White
New York blazes like a magnificent jewel in its fit setting of sea, and earth, and stars. ~ Thomas Wolfe
Surely no streets have been portrayed on the pages of comics as often as Manhattan’s, most famously as Metropolis by day and Gotham by night. Not to be outdone, Spider-Man once even said “I am New York.” Batman, the Ninja Turtles, the Fantastic Four, Superman and a host of other do-gooders in stretch pants may have thoughts on that. ~ Pascal Wyse
  • The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.
    • Horace Walpole, English art historian, writer, antiquarian and politician in a letter to Sir Horace Mann (24 November 1774).
  • The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.
    All dwellers in cities must dwell with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer who might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.
    • E.B. White, "Here Is New York," Holiday (1948); reprinted in Here is New York (1949)
  • No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.
  • These essays, then, come from New York: the real and imagined city where feminist sexual liberationists, rootless cosmopolitan Jews, not-nice girls/boys/others, loudmouth exiles of all colors are an integral and conspicuous part of the landscape; the pariah community Dan Quayle lambasted as a failed welfare state shortly before making his inspired leap from Murphy Brown's baby to L.A. lawlessness
    • Ellen Willis No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (1992)
  • Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it — fragmentary and uncertain though it is — that distinguishes man from all other animals.
  • One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
  • From my room, I could lie across my bed and watch the cars rush along Central Park West. In a hurry to get someplace. Everyone in New York is in a hurry. You see businessmen walking fast, their heads bowed, the cuffs of their pants flapping hard against their ankles. They don't look at anyone. Once I followed this man, walking so close behind him I could have been his daughter—but he never even looked over and noticed me. For two blocks I walked like that beside him. It made me sad for him—that he could walk through this world without looking left or right.
  • If you have made it this far into the story, the chances are the city in your mind is New York. Or at least some version of it. Surely no streets have been portrayed on the pages of comics as often as Manhattan’s, most famously as Metropolis by day and Gotham by night. Not to be outdone, Spider-Man once even said “I am New York.” Batman, the Ninja Turtles, the Fantastic Four, Superman and a host of other do-gooders in stretch pants may have thoughts on that. As might Mitchell Hundred, who, despite possessing superpowers unsuited to desk work, hangs up his cape and becomes mayor of the city in Ex Machina. “Stopping bullets ain’t in your job description anymore, boss,” says his aide when the guns come out.
    There may not be a birth certificate for comics (especially if you embrace the broader definition of “sequential art”), but the strip was certainly raised in New York, and well fed by the competition between newspapers and their publishers in the early 1900s. Well nourished, too, by the meat and drink of urban life.
  • No one’s dreams were more coloured by the city than Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, one of the earliest US strips, which ran in the New York Herald from 1905-1911. As he falls into a fantastic sleep, Nemo’s cot grows legs like a giraffe and he strides, almost Godzilla-like, through fantastic, sky-scraping scenery inspired by McCay’s memories of city expos and theme-park rollercoasters – a kind of fantasy architecture. It’s the architecture of the page, though, that McCay was most radical with. Nemo didn’t just reach across the page, but down it, in dizzying vertical panels that knocked out the supporting walls of the old calendar-like “waffle” of the comic.

Y

[edit]
New York is symbolic for the pride of mankind. ~ Cevat Yerli
  • New York is symbolic for the pride of mankind.
    • Cevat Yerli, CEO and President and Crytek, on why Crysis 2 was set in New York City. [4].
  • New York was full of wonders, different from Chicago, brighter, cleaner. The clear sunlight was a startling contrast to the smoky atmosphere of the crude city I had left...Now and then I meandered into the heart of the East Side. Here was stark poverty, even worse than I had seen in the slums of Chicago. Great numbers of children played amid filth and debris in the narrow streets. Old people sat on doorsteps or moved listlessly along the walks. They seemed to have lost hope. Gangs of toughs congregated on corners. But looking at all this squalor I felt instinctively that most human beings did not prefer dirt to cleanliness, and they did not like stealing better than earning, nor a bad name better than a good one.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)

[edit]

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 552-53.

  • Stream of the living world
    Where dash the billows of strife!—
    One plunge in the mighty torrent
    Is a year of tamer life!
    City of glorious days,
    Of hope, and labour and mirth,
    With room and to spare, on thy splendid bays
    For the ships of all the earth!
  • Silent, grim, colossal, the Big City has ever stood against its revilers. They call it hard as iron; they say that nothing of pity beats in its bosom; they compare its streets with lonely forests and deserts of lava. But beneath the hard crust of the lobster is found a delectable and luscious food. Perhaps a different simile would have been wiser. Still nobody should take offence. We would call nobody a lobster with good and sufficient claws.
    • O. Henry, Between Rounds. In Four Million.
  • New York is the Caoutchouc City. * * * They have the furor rubberendi.
    • O. Henry, Comedy in Rubber. In The Voice of the City.
  • In dress, habits, manners, provincialism, routine and narrowness, he acquired that charming insolence, that irritating completeness, that sophisticated crassness, that overbalanced poise that makes the Manhattan gentleman so delightfully small in his greatness.
    • O. Henry, Defeat of the City. In The Voice of the City.
  • Far below and around lay the city like a ragged purple dream. The irregular houses were like the broken exteriors of cliffs lining deep gulches and winding streams. Some were mountainous; some lay in long, monotonous rows like, the basalt precipices hanging over desert cañons. Such was the background of the wonderful, cruel, enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city. But into this background were cut myriads of brilliant parallelograms and circles and squares through which glowed many colored lights. And out of the violet and purple depths ascended like the city's soul, sounds and odors and thrills that make up the civic body. There arose the breath of gaiety unrestrained, of love, of hate, of all the passions that man can know. There below him lay all things, good or bad, that can be brought from the four corners of the earth to instruct, please, thrill, enrich, elevate, cast down, nurture or kill. Thus the flavor of it came up to him and went into his blood.
    • O. Henry, The Duel. In Strictly Business.
  • Well, little old Noisyville-on-the-Subway is good enough for me * * * Me for it from the rathskellers up. Sixth Avenue is the West now to me.
    • O. Henry, The Duel. In Strictly Business.
  • "If you don't mind me asking," came the bell-like tones of the Golden Diana, "I'd like to know where you got that City Hall brogue. I did not know that Liberty was necessarily Irish." "If ye'd studied the history of art in its foreign complications, ye'd not need to ask," replied Mrs. Liberty, "If ye wasn't so light and giddy ye'd know that I was made by a Dago and presented to the American people on behalf of the French Government for the purpose of welcomin' Irish immigrants into the Dutch city of New York. 'Tis that I've been doing night and day since I was erected."
    • O. Henry, The Lady Higher Up. In Sixes and Sevens.
  • GEORGE WASHINGTON, with his right arm upraised, sits his iron horse at the lower corner of Union Square * * * Should the General raise his left hand as he has raised his right, it would point to a quarter of the city that forms a haven for the oppressed and suppressed of foreign lands. In the cause of national or personal freedom they have found refuge here, and the patriot who made it for them sits his steed, overlooking their district, while he listens through his left ear to vaudeville that caricatures the posterity of his protégés.
    • O. Henry, A Philistine in Bohemia. In Voice of the City.
  • If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, called New York. Cosmopolitan they call it, you bet. So's a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. "Little old New York's good enough for us"—that's what they sing.
    • O. Henry, A Tempered Wind. In The Gentle Grafter.
  • You'd think New York people was all wise; but no, they can't get a chance to learn. Every thing's too compressed. Even the hayseeds are bailed hayseeds. But what else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?
    • O. Henry, A Tempered Wind. In The Gentle Grafter.
  • Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
    With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
    Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
    A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
    Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
    Mother of exiles.
  • Some day this old Broadway shall climb to the skies,
    As a ribbon of cloud on a soul-wind shall rise,
    And we shall be lifted, rejoicing by night,
    Till we join with the planets who choir their delight.
    The signs in the streets and the signs in the skies
    Shall make a new Zodiac, guiding the wise,
    And Broadway make one with that marvelous stair
    That is climbed by the rainbow-clad spirits of prayer.
  • For reasons becoming clear to me, New York City you are dead to me. Well, you can turn back time but I'm never coming back.
  • Up in the heights of the evening skies I see my City of Cities float
    In sunset's golden and crimson dyes: I look and a great joy clutches my throat!
    Plateau of roofs by canyons crossed: windows by thousands fire-furled—
    O gazing, how the heart is lost in the Deepest City in the World.
  • Just where the Treasury's marble front
    * Looks over Wall Street's mingled nations,—
    Where Jews and Gentiles most are wont
    * To throng for trade and last, quotations;
    Where, hour, by hour, the rates of gold
    * Outrival, in the ears of people,
    The quarter-chimes, serenely tolled
    From Trinity's undaunted steeple.
  • Lo! body and soul!—this land!
    Mighty Manhattan, with spires, and
    The sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships;
    The varied and ample land,—the South
    And the North in the light—Ohio's shores, and flashing Missouri,
    And ever the far-spreading prairies, covered with grass and corn.
    • Walt Whitman, Sequel to Drum-Taps. When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd, Stanza 12.

Songs

[edit]
In New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made, oh. There's nothing you can't do, now you're in New York. ~ Shawn Carter
Big pimping, up in NYC. ~ Shawn Carter
It's a city where a man can fulfill his dreams... Let me never leave it. New York's my home, sweet home. ~ Sammy Davis
Whether she is clean or dirty she's the greatest town that you'll ever find, yeah! ~ Lenny Kravitz
It's a new soundtrack, I could dance to this beat
The lights are so bright, but they never blind me. ~ Taylor Swift
In this cold and heartless city
Isn't the village a pretty place
Aglow in the morning sun? ~ What's So Bad About Feeling Good?
  • But we're hunters; we take pride in airing our prey out. Leaving them laid out, dead, in just a sport. Because we aren't playing up here in New York.
  • In New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made, oh
    There's nothing you can't do, now you're in New York
    These streets will make you feel brand new
    Big lights will inspire you, let's hear it for New York
    New York, New York.
  • 'Cause everyone's my friend in New York City
    And everything looks beautiful when you're young and pretty
    The streets are paved with diamonds and there's just so much to see
    But the best thing about New York City is you and me.
    • cub, New York City.
  • Cause when you leave New York
    Man, you don't go anywhere

    It's a city where a man
    Can fulfill his dreams
    The only town that's left
    That's got three baseball teams

    (That's why New York's his home)
    Let me never leave it
    New York's my home, sweet home
  • I had seven faces
    thought I knew which one to wear
    But I'm sick of spending these lonely nights
    training myself not to care
    the subway, she is a porno
    and the pavements they are a mess
    I know you've supported me for a long time
    somehow I'm not impressed
    New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)
  • Brownsville, Flatbush, Crown Heights, Brooklyn Zoo... Welcome to the jungle. New York, New York. Gangsters use sign language, and let their guns talk.
  • Me, I'm takin' a Greyhound
    On the Hudson River line
    I'm in a New York State of Mind
  • She is a rock
    As we pull but she is steady
    And no one can take her freedom away, yeah
    (Can't take her freedom)
    I love her style
    Whether she is clean or dirty
    She's the greatest town that you'll ever find, yeah!
  • She is my heart
    I love New York City
    She's lived and died
    So many times, yeah!
    Life is always tough
    On New York City, oh lord
    But she is fine, she always survives, yeah!
  • New York, New York, a helluva town. The Bronx is up but the Battery's down.
  • It's easier to leave than to be left behind
    Leaving was never my proud
    Leaving New York, never easy
    I saw the light fading out
    You find it in your heart, it's pulling me apart
    You find it in your heart, change...
  • Welcome to New York, it's been waitin' for you
    Welcome to New York, welcome to New York [...]
    It's a new soundtrack, I could dance to this beat, beat forevermore
    The lights are so bright, but they never blind me, me [...] Like any great love, it keeps you guessing
    Like any real love, it's ever-changing
    Like any true love, it drives you crazy
    But you know you wouldn't change anything, anything, anything [...] It's a new soundtrack, I could dance to this beat
    The lights are so bright, but they never blind me
  • Why do we still live here
    In this repulsive town?
    All our friends are in New York
  • In New York freedom looks like too many choices
    In New York I found a friend to drown out the other voices
    Voices on the cell phone
    Voices from home
    Voices of the hard sell
    Voices down the stairwell
    In New York, just got a place in New York
    • U2, New York.
  • Village neighbors [Singing theme song]:
    In this cold and heartless city
    Isn't the village a pretty place
    Aglow in the morning sun?

    Can't imagine why it should be,
    But something's happened to me
    I feel like smiling at     everyone.

    Though the world may not be perfect yet,
    Still the only way we're gonna get any better is if we     try.
    Look at the fun we've been missing
    Things like huggin' and kissin'
    So let's enjoy it the way we should.
    Tell me what's so bad,
    Tell me what's so bad
    About feeling good?

    Always thought that life was just a drag
    Now this daisy's got a brand new bag
    Hey world take a good look at me.

    Though I'm flying high as a kite,
    What turns me on is the sight of life,
    The grooviest trip of all
    Best kick I've ever had,
    So tell me what's so bad about feeling good?

    Village neighbors [Singing theme song]: So don't forget to carry a smile
    And maybe after a while it will all turn out the way it should
    So tell me what's so bad about feeling good?

Dialogue

[edit]
  • Mitchell Hundred: Kremlin? Jesus, you can't just break into Gracie Mansion, you nutjob!
Kremlin: Yes, when I come here from Russia as child, this whole place was filled with nothing but filthy restrooms for the park-goers.
Mitchell Hundred: Funny, somebody just told me my office downtown was once a jail. Everything good in New York used to be something awful, I guess.
Kremlin: And everything awful used to be something good.
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