Massachusetts Is Quotes & Sayings

PILGRIM, n. A traveler that is taken seriously. A Pilgrim Father was one who [was] not permitted to sing psalms through his nose [in Europe], followed it to Massachusetts, where he could personate God according to the dictates of his conscience. — Ambrose Bierce

I bring my hand to my face and pull away tiny pieces of the jagged scab. My face reflects in the rounded airplane window, and I see it is now a tiny Massachusetts, with Cape Cod curling toward my ear. In only a few more days it will be gone. I feel the fresh, smooth parts and marvel at how soft they are. New skin amazes me. New skin is a miracle. It is proof that we can heal. — A.S. King

Indeed, if I understand this global-warming business correctly, the danger is that the waters will rise and drown the whole of Massachusetts, New York City, Long Island, the California coast and a few big cities on the Great Lakes - in other words, every Democratic enclave will be wiped out leaving only the solid Republican heartland. Politically speaking, for conservatives there's no downside to global warming. — Mark Steyn

So I'm standing in a tree thirty feet above the pond with my three friends and my friend Pat says, "Dude, jump!" And I look down at the water, which is so far away, and I say, "That doesn't seem like a good plan." And they said, "Dude, we already jumped, it's no biggie. What's the worst thing that could happen? It's only watah" (that's "water" with a Boston accent), which is really flawed logic, that watah logic. I learn later that many bad things historically have happened in water. Shark attacks. Drowning. Bad sex. But my friend Nick makes an argument that in Massachusetts is irrefutable. He's like, "Do it." So I do. — Mike Birbiglia

Millennials in the workplace have been called "orchids"2 (can't survive outside the greenhouse) and "teacups"3 (chip easily and then are ruined), but to me the most prescient metaphor for young adults sent out into the world after being overparented is "veal" - a term coined by Massachusetts educator Joe Maruszczak - meaning they're raised in controlled environments and led, metaphorically, to slaughter. None of us took a course called "how to hold your kid back," but overparenting appears to be seriously poor preparation for life in the work world. In 2014, interested — Julie Lythcott-Haims

The irony is that we've seen this model work really well in Massachusetts because Gov. Romney did a good thing, working with Democrats in the state to set up what is essentially the identical model and, as a consequence, people are covered there. It hasn't destroyed jobs. And as a consequence, we now have a system in which we have the opportunity to start bringing down costs as opposed to just leaving millions of people out in the cold." "Gov. Romney said this has to be done on a bipartisan basis — Barack Obama

Sometimes a soldier returns home and all he can do is share his story in the hopes that somehow, in some way, it helps another soldier make sense of things. And although the stories may not be perfect, sometimes just sharing is enough to make a difference. — Michael Anthony

It is time to acknowledge the extraordinary sacrifice of all of our veterans. While many Massachusetts soldiers served our nation in a period technically dubbed 'peacetime,' they restored American pride in the wake of Vietnam and helped bring a successful end to the Cold War. The service of these men and women was not without cost. There are countless stories of soldiers who served with great distinction only to be denied veteran status after returning home. Every man and woman who volunteered to serve this country should be treated with the same degree of respect, gratitude and dignity. — Mitt Romney

And I agree that the Democratic legislators in Massachusetts might have given some advice to Republicans in Congress about how to cooperate. But the fact of the matter is we used the same advisers and they say it's the same plan. — Barack Obama

And a special thank you to the citizens of Massachusetts: You are paying all the taxes, creating all the jobs, raising all the children. This government is yours. Thank you for letting me serve you. I love this job. — Mitt Romney

Holly is the bestselling author and co-creator of The Spiderwick Chronicles series and won a Newbery Honor for her novel Doll Bones. Cassie is the author of bestselling YA series, including The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices. They both live in Western Massachusetts, about ten minutes away from each other. — Holly Black

Romney is a classic case of re-invention. As governor of Massachusetts, he supported government-sponsored healthcare, was sympathetic to gay rights, and opposed harsh restrictions on abortion. After measuring the difference between the Massachusetts electorate and the national one to which he must now appeal, he has reversed those positions. — Stephen Kinzer

Sumer, the land which came to be known in classical times as Babylonia, consists of the lower half of Mesopotamia, roughly identical with modern Iraq from north of Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. It has an area of approximately 10,000 square miles, somewhat larger than the state of Massachusetts. Its climate is extremely hot and dry, and its soil, left to itself, is arid, wind-swept, and unproductive. The land is flat and river-made, and therefore has no minerals whatever and almost no stone. Except for the huge reeds in the marshes, — Samuel Noah Kramer

To enlarge the sphere of social happiness is worthy of the benevolent design of a Masonic institution; and it is most fervently to be wished, that the conduct of every member of the fraternity, as well as those publications, that discover the principles which actuate them, may tend to convince mankind that the grand object of Masonry is to promote the happiness of the human race.
[Letter to the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, January 1793] — George Washington

There's nothing noble or selfless about politicians and there never has been. Putting it charitably, Profiles in Courage is a compendium of Democratic mythology, ghostwritten for an ambitious young Massachusetts Senator who never did a thing for himself if he could pay to have it done by others. — L. Neil Smith

A picture of me as this super affable sales guy gets painted, but in actuality, I'm pretty driven by hard work and love working with teams. What people discount is, I grew up in a very small blue-collar town in Massachusetts and have basically scrapped my way career wise. — Tim Armstrong

There is no one who's gonna be sitting on that stage who has the record of job creation I have. There's one in particular who's created jobs all around the world. While he was the governor of Massachusetts he didn't create many jobs. — Rick Perry

The failure of emancipation to take root during the war is one of the great What ifs of the Revolution. Another is: What if blacks had not fought for the American cause? What if a slave had not saved Colonel William Washington's life, with the result that his cavalry charge dissolved and the Battle of Cowpens had become a British victory? As the historian Thomas Fleming speculates, both North and South Carolina might well have gone over to the British. What if Glover's regiment of Massachusetts sailors had not had the manpower to complete the evacuation of Washington's army before the fog lifted in New York - and Washington himself, waiting for the last boat, had been captured? * — Henry Wiencek

In winter night Massachusetts Street is dismal, the ground's frozen cold, the ruts and pock holes have ice, thin snow slides over the jagged black cracks. The river is frozen to stolidity, waits; hung on a shore with remnant show-off boughs of June
Ice skaters, Swedes, Irish girls, yellers and singers
they throng on the white ice beneath the crinkly stars that have no altar moon, no voice, but down heavy tragic space make halyards of Heaven on in deep, to where the figures fantastic amassed by scientists cream in a cold mass; the veil of Heaven on tiaras and diadems of a great Eternity Brunette called night. — Jack Kerouac

Massachusetts is the first state in America to reach full adulthood. The rest of America is still in adolescence. — Uwe Reinhardt

I was an actor as a kid in Boston. Then I went to art school with Brice Marden, the Massachusetts College of Art. So the hybrid of being an actor and artist is a director. — Arne Glimcher

Cape Cod is the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts. The shoulder is at Buzzard's Bay; the elbow at Cape Mallebarre; the wrist at Truro; and the sandy fist at Provincetown. — Henry David Thoreau

Massachusetts, which is hard to spell, it is hard not to — Lenore Look

Research by James Poterba at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology finds that the wealth of the U.S.'s elderly is highly skewed. About half of retirees have little or no financial wealth when they retire and depend almost entirely on Social Security for their income. — Greg Ip

Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships - the one-day variety or longer - these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of "school" to include family as the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents - and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 - we're going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. — John Taylor Gatto

This is an issue just like 9-11 ... We didn't decide we wanted to fight the war on terrorism because we wanted to. It was brought to us. And if not now, when? When the supreme courts in all the other states have succumbed to the Massachusetts version of the law? — Rick Santorum

Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted - sometimes with guns - by an estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard. — John Taylor Gatto

The fact is I've been in Massachusetts for the last two weeks, and it seems over the last few days that the price is increasing by the hour at the pump, so there needs to be an aggressive investigation. — Marty Meehan

[Mitt Romney is a] Massachusetts moderate who, in fact, is pretty good at managing the decay." He's "given no evidence in his years in Massachusetts of any ability to change the culture or change the political structure. — Newt Gingrich

Massachusetts led the nation passing the first state minimum wage a century ago in June 1912, and with passage of an $11 state minimum wage ... will be leading the nation again with a wage floor that is good for business, good for customers and good for our economy. — Holly Sklar

Is this your boyfriend?" the first nun asked.
Clair Olivia looked me up and down. "No. This is my gay friend who decided he was straight and single-handedly wrecked havoc at an all-boys school in Massachusetts this fall. He's gay again and home for Christmas, so yay! — Bill Konigsberg

Our nation is too different, too diverse to say that what works in Massachusetts is somehow going to be grabbed by the federal government, usurping the power of states and imposing a one-size-fits-all plan on the nation. That will not work. — Mitt Romney

Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;
and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The place (Dogtown, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, fh) is forsaken and majestically lovely as if nature had at last formed one spot where she can live for herself alone.. (it) looked like a cross between Easter Island and Stonehenge - essentially druidic in it appearance, it gives the feeling that an ancient race might turn up at any moment and renew an ageless rite there. — Marsden Hartley

To me there is nothing more fraught with mystery & terror than a remote Massachusetts farmhouse against a lonely hill. Where else could an outbreak like the Salem witchcraft have occurred? — H.P. Lovecraft

They know your name, address, telephone number, credit card numbers, who ELSE is driving the car "for insurance", ... your driver's license number. In the state of Massachusetts, this is the same number as that used for Social Security, unless you object to such use. In THAT case, you are ASSIGNED a number and you reside forever more on the list of "weird people who don't give out their Social Security Number in Massachusetts." — Arthur Miller

These multiplying societies treated the sick, aided the industrious poor, housed orphans, fed imprisoned debtors, built huts for shipwrecked sailors, and, in the case of the Massachusetts Humane Society, even attempted to resuscitate those suffering from "suspended animation," that is, those such as drowning victims who appeared to be dead but actually were not. The fear of being buried alive was a serious concern at this time. Many, like Washington on his deathbed, asked that their bodies not be immediately interred in case they might be suffering from suspended animation. — Gordon S. Wood

In Massachusetts, scientists have created the first human clone. The bad thing is that in thirty years, the clone will still be depressed because the Boston Red Sox will still have not won a World Series. — Craig Kilborn

My family is first-generation Nigerian, and we grew up in a very small, suburban town in New England, Massachusetts. So I do understand what it feels like to be an 'only' in that regard. — Uzo Aduba

The average parent may, for example, plant an artist or fertilize a ballet dancer and end up with a certified public accountant. We cannot train children along chicken wire to make them grow in the right direction. Tying them to stakes is frowned upon, even in Massachusetts. — Ellen Goodman

Henry Adams was scared shitless, politically, by the discovery that England isn't alien to a boy from Boston, but it was true, and it is true. It's a Boston and coastal Massachusetts thing. Henry Adams blocked it out. — William Monahan

My next book is on the Salem witch trials. As a small-town Massachusetts girl, this makes me very happy. So does the reunion with documents! — Stacy Schiff

The available divorce data show that marital breakdown is now considerably more common in the Bible Belt than in the secular Northeast ... The percentages of broken families and unwed mothers remained higher in places like Arkansas and Oklahoma than in New York and Massachusetts. — Joe Conason

Springtime in Massachusetts is depressing for those who embrace a progressive view of history and experience. It does not gradually develop as spring is supposed to. Instead, the crocuses bloom and the grass grows, but the foliage is independent from the weather, which gets colder and colder and sadder and sadder until June when one day it becomes brutishly hot without warning ... It was fitting, then, that the first people who chose to settle there were mentally suspect. — Rebecca Harrington

We have been gradually finding out that there is more democracy in letting a committee or representative ten to details than in making everybody's business nobody's business. — Edward Pearson Pressey

Massachusetts, like Queen Elizabeth, encouraged salt making through the granting of monopolies to those who showed the skill to produce salt cheaply. The colony granted Samuel Winslow a ten-year monopoly to employ his ideas on salt producing, which is considered the first patent issued in America. — Mark Kurlansky

Chet Raymo is professor of physics and astronomy at Stonehill College in Massachusetts. He is a convinced naturalist with a strong mystical bent. Few writers in our time are able to open up vistas of grandeur in the world of objects and entities as he does. In his book Skeptics and True Believers:The Exhilarating Connection between Science and Religion, he illustrates in his brilliant and inimitable style the marvels that are all around us in this universe. — Ravi Zacharias

I grew up in a town called Hopedale, Massachusetts. I was born there in 1964, and the only thing I hate outside of myself is everything else. — Dana Gould

What we want is not mainly to colonize Nebraska with free men, but to colonize Massachusetts with free men-to be free ourselves. As the enterprise of a few individuals, that is brave and practical; but as the enterprise of the State, it is cowardice and imbecility. What odds where we squat, or bow much ground we cover? It is not the soil that we would make free, but men. — Henry David Thoreau

Country jakes are always whining about the sanctity of states' rights and individual freedoms. Yet when a couple of queers want to get married in Massachusetts, half the South goes apeshit with homemade posters and fire-breathing sermons. And when a few million concerned residents of states thousands of miles away decide they want to stop destroying their landscape in the name of corporate mammon and consumer stupidity, the South sends out its greasy merchants of avarice to cajole, bribe, hector, lie, intimidate, and "lobby" until the seed of their plantation mentality is protected and their gluttonous mouths are once again filled with the jizz of the master caste before whom they kneel like Bourbon Street whores on Navy payday. — Chuck Thompson

It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre "kick". Here is material for a really profound study in group-neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination. — H.P. Lovecraft

Massachusetts is seeing a surge in the number of unvaccinated children. Last year nearly 1,200 kids entered kindergarten with religious or philosophical vaccine exemptions, roughly double the total about a decade ago. — Deborah Blum

I'm a big believer in getting money from where the money is, and the money is in Washington. I learned from running the Olympics that you can get money there to help build economic opportunities. We actually got over $410 million from the federal government; that is a huge increase over anything ever done before. We did that by going after every agency of government. That kind of creativity I want to bring to everything we do (in Massachusetts). — Mitt Romney

We are Sinclairs. Beautiful. Privileged. Damaged. Liar. We live, least in the summertime, on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts. Perhaps that is all you need to know. — E. Lockhart

in their supposed innocence of and opposition to empire, have become the mythic progenitors of the United States - almost as improbably as Solomon was of Ethiopia or Aeneas of Rome or his suppositious brother, Brut, of Britain. But almost everything most Americans think about the Plymouth colonists of 1620 is false. The truth is more credible. The first colonists in Massachusetts, exchanging accusations of "bestial, yea, diabolical affectations," were as divided and conflicted as people usually are when fate flings them together. Their leaders did not seek — Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Whether it was turning around failing companies, rescuing the Olympics, or improving the business climate in Massachusetts, Mitt Romney has proven that he is ready to be president on Day One. — Timothy Griffin

My understanding is that Kansas, Massachusetts, they've been more pioneers on the special education side. — Margaret Spellings

No: until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until I am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case. — Henry David Thoreau

There are now reports that President Obama will name Massachusetts Senator John Kerry to be the next secretary of defense. Apparently this is part of America's new defense strategy to bore our enemies to death. — Jay Leno

At least when I get on the Boston train I have a good chance of landing in the South Station
And not in that part of the daily press which is reserved for victims of aviation. — Ogden Nash

Two years ago, George Bush felt prompted to address this issue. More spending on public education, said the president, isn't "the best answer." Mr. Bush went on to caution parents of poor children who see money "as a cure" for education problems. "A society that worships money ... ," said the president, "is a society in peril." The president himself attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts - a school that spends $11,000 yearly on each pupil, not including costs of room and board. If money is a wise investment for the education of a future president at Andover, it is no less so for the child of poor people in Detroit. But the climate of the times does not encourage this belief, and the president's words will surely reinforce that climate. — Jonathan Kozol

My real name is Joe Kennedy, but if you live in Massachusetts, you can't sign 'Joe Kennedy.' So, back in 1957, I stuck the X on my name to be different from those people in Hyannis Port. — X.J. Kennedy

There are winter evenings in Massachusetts when there is no wind and the crust on the snow seems to hold in the cold. And if the moon is three-quarters full, its light adds a kind of warmth to the surrounding earth. — Kathleen Kent

Our governor in Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, once told a story about his grandma. She said, "Don't call people 'the poor.' Call people broke. Broke is temporary." I try not to say "the poor" because it sounds like a sentence, like I'm putting people in a box, far away from those of us who can make ends meet. But someone who is broke, on the other hand, is a peer. — Molly Phinney Baskette

I can tell you, Massachusetts, fastest growing sector of our economy is clean energy and energy efficiency companies. And they're growing faster than any other sector. — John F. Kerry

Is it really over?" Kurlansky lamented over the dry-docked Massachusetts cod fishermen at the conclusion of his moving, epic book. "Are these the last gatherers of food from the wild to be phased out? Is this the last of wild food? Is our last physical tie to untamed nature to become an obscure delicacy like the occasional pheasant?"
These words stayed with me over the years to come. But histories of environmental wrong doing have a strange way of putting traumatic events in the past, sealing off bad human behavior of former times from the unwritten pages of the present and the future. — Paul Greenberg

Only a handful of therapeutic communities inspired by his Massachusetts ones exist in American prisons today. But, as it happens, one of them is situated on the top floor of the Hudson County Correctional Center in Kearny, New Jersey. And it is being quietly run by the former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey. — Jon Ronson

Moving is easy, exciting, an adventure - when you're young. Later, not so much. I love Massachusetts, my old home. Sometimes, late at night, I even study the real estate ads in my old hometown. But it's not even a fantasy. My parents are both gone. The world I left doesn't exist anymore. Neither does the person I was. — Susan Estrich

This is something which I think this country needs ... I want universal coverage! I want everyone in Massachusetts and in this country to have insurance. I support universal health care. — Mitt Romney

She managed to clear her throat. I'm sure this is impossible for you to comprehend, Deuce, but somehow, some way, without formal therapy or controlled substances, every single resident in the town of Rockingham, Massachusetts, has managed to survive your long absence. Every. Single. One. — Roxanne St. Claire

roughly identical with modern Iraq from north of Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. It has an area of approximately 10,000 square miles, somewhat larger than the state of Massachusetts. Its climate is extremely hot and dry, and — Samuel Noah Kramer

I'm from Connecticut, and we don't have any dialects. Well, I don't think we have any dialects, and yeah, it's very complex. That Rhode Island/Massachusetts New England region is arguably the hardest dialect to nail. — Seth MacFarlane

Is it an endearing quirk among European explorers to imagine that every geographical feature they clap eyes on for the first time is in need of a new name, or is if just a plain silly one? As far as I understand, humans have been knocking around this part of Africa for - give or take a birthday candle- three million years. The existence of a large wet patch smack in the middle of them had not gone unnoticed. How large? Bigger than Lake Michigan, bigger than Tasmania, bigger than Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Rhode Island all rolled into one. It is so big that people on one side gave it one name, people on the other side gave it another, and people in between gave it several more. But that didn't matter to Dr Livingstone. Along he came and he didn't ask the locals what they called this large lake at the top end of the Nile. He gave it yet another name, in honour of the elder of a tribe of white people on a small island five thousand miles away. — Nicholas Drayson

The Turkish Embassy in Washington is an ornate, eclectic building on the corner of Twenty-third Street and Massachusetts Avenue which was built originally for Edward Hamlin Everett, the man who put the crimp in bottle caps. — George W. S. Trow

Myth The United States of America is made up of fifty states. Truth Technically, no. There are only forty-six states in the United States - Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia are commonwealths. — Leland Gregory

The names of the compact's signers, including Anne Hutchinson's husband, Will, are listed below the text. Here lies the deepest reason why the Woman's Healing Garden strikes me as so forlorn - that Hutchinson is remembered here by pink echinacea in bloom instead of on the Portsmouth Compact plaque, where she belongs. All of the signers were there because of her, because she stood up to Massachusetts and they stood with her. But all the signers were men. Anne Hutchinson wasn't allowed to sign the founding document of the colony she founded. — Sarah Vowell

As time would prove, he had written one of the great, enduring documents of the American Revolution. The constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the oldest functioning written constitution in the world. — David McCullough

I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts; she needs none. There she is. Behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston and Concord and Lexington and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain forever. — Daniel Webster

I can work in London. A British journalist asked me if I had any trouble working with an English crew, as an American, and I said I might have if I was from Scotland, but I'm from Massachusetts, which is sort of Oxfordshire, but more intellectual. That's kind of unforgivable but you've got to let them have it. — William Monahan

The late rebellion in Massachusetts has given more alarm than I think it should have done. Calculate that one rebellion in thirteen states in the course of eleven years, is but one for each state in a century and a half. No country should be so long without one. Nor will any degree of power in the hands of government prevent insurrections. — Thomas Jefferson

With the presidential debates right around the corner, John Kerry is going to play Mitt Romney to help the President prepare for the debates. That's kind of a stretch; a rich white guy from Massachusetts playing a rich white guy from Massachusetts. — Jay Leno