San Francisco City Quotes & Sayings

San Francisco is one of my favourite cities in the world ... I would probably rank it at the top or near the top. It's small but photogenic and has layers ... You never have problems finding great angles that people have never done. — Ang Lee

You wouldn't think such a place as San Francisco could exist. The wonderful sunlight there, the hills, the great bridges, the Pacific at your shoes. Beautiful Chinatown. Every race in the world. The sardine fleets sailing out. The little cable-cars whizzing down The City hills. And all the people are open and friendly. — Dylan Thomas

of all the cities he had been to - Detroit, Indianapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Salt Lake City - San Francisco was by far the worst. — Tracy Chevalier

Most inspiration still comes from bicycling around San Francisco. This city never fails to inspire me. It is one of the most vibrant cities - especially visually - with a constant influx of young energy arriving daily. I love it. — Barry McGee

The ultimate [travel destination] for me would be one perfect day in San Francisco. There's no city like it anywhere. And, if I could be there with the girl of my dreams, that would be the ultimate! — Larry King

Sometimes it's necessary to shame the city's business class, the columnist later remarked, to remind them that a city like San Francisco is more than just a real estate opportunity - it's "a precious, special, fragile place. — David Talbot

I like the fog that creeps over the whole city every night about five, and the warm protective feeling it gives ... and lights of San Francisco at night, the fog horn, the bay at dusk and the little flower stands where spring flowers appear before anywhere else in the country ... But, most of all, I like the view of the ocean from the Cliff House. — Irene Dunne

The first gang members who joined the military were known as the Hounds, a group of former New York gang members. — Carter F. Smith

A city is where you can sign a petition, boo the chief justice, fish off a pier, gaze at a hippopotamus, buy a flower at the corner, or get a good hamburger or a bad girl at 4 A.M. A city is where sirens make white streaks of sound in the sky and foghorns speak in dark grays. San Francisco is such a city. — Herb Caen

You have to ask what the end game is here - when 25 percent of Palo Alto homes are sold to overseas buyers as investments while the mainland Chinese property market tanks, when Palo Alto schools are known for their suicide rates as much as their academics, when the city that gave birth to the technology industry now can't even house startups because of its sky-high commercial rents, when Latino and black communities are being wiped from the Western side of the San Francisco Bay Area and Oakland out into the exurbs of the East only to be called back by smartphone to deliver laundry or drive people around. — Anonymous

San Francisco is a mad city - inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty. — Rudyard Kipling

As Mayor, I will lead city government, businesses, and community groups to support innovative projects that will make San Francisco streets and public places vibrant and healthy. — Gavin Newsom

What brings you up to the City? he said when we were inside. To San Franciscans, there's only one city. — Ross Macdonald

I chose the San Francisco earthquake because it's very interesting- although maybe that isn't the word you'd have used if you'd actually been in San Francisco on April 18, 1906. You wouldn't have said, "Wow! This is an interesting earthquake!" while you were running for your life to get away from the collapsing buildings or fires that swept across the city afterward. — Belinda Hollyer

I don't know of any other city where you can walk through so many culturally diverse neighborhoods, and you're never out of sight of the wild hills. Nature is very close here. — Gary Snyder

San Francisco, America's B-movie imitation of Paris. San Francisco, the city that ruined punk rock. San Francisco, the most intolerant place in the country. — Jim Goad

Everybody sympathized with him so much that when he appeared in his fantastic uniform and declared himself to be Emperor of America nobody had the heart to contradict him. He was a gentle and kindly man, and fortunately found himself in the friendliest and most sentimental city in the world, the idea being 'let him be emperor if he wants to.' San Francisco played the game with him. — Isobel Field

I run in London, in San Francisco - any city that's got a waterfront or park. — Danny Meyer

I think unleashing 3,000 smart bombs against the city of Baghdad in the first several days of the war ... to me, if those were unleashed against the San Francisco Bay Area, I would call that an act of extreme terrorism. — Pete Stark

The drive to Black Rock City from San Francisco leads through the Nevada flatlands, past the jittering neon sadness of Reno. — Daniel Pinchbeck

This (San Francisco) is the most beautiful city in America, Probably because it looks nothing like America — Ilya Ilf

This is the first place in the United States where I sang, and I like San Francisco better than any other city in the world. I love no city more than this one. Where else could I sing outdoors on Christmas Eve? — Luisa Tetrazzini

Tell me what you will of the benefactions of city civilization, of the sweet security of streets-all as part of the natural upgrowth of man towards the high destiny we hear so much of. I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure air is found. If the death exhalations that brood the broad towns in which we so fondly compact ourselves were made visible, we should flee as from a plague. All are more or less sick; there is not a perfectly sane man in San Francisco. — John Muir

The San Francisco skyline sparkles in the distance, the bay spread out before it like a shark-infested welcome mat. — T.T. Monday

We're crazy about this city. Los Angeles? That's just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for the trip to San Francisco. — John Lennon

I forgot that San Francisco is not an angry city like New York. Gays have gotten what they wanted there over the years, unlike New York, where we had to fight for everything. — Larry Kramer

San Francisco! City of dreaming spires, people live here ... Golden Gate Bridge, ahh the Romans came here. — Eddie Izzard

In some ways I consider myself more Chinese, because I live in San Francisco, which is becoming a predominantly Asian city. I avoid falling into the black-and-white dialectic in which most of America still seems trapped. I have always recognized that, as an American, I am in relationship with other parts of the world; that I have to measure myself against the Pacific, against Asia. Having to think of myself in relationship to that horizon has liberated me from the black-and-white checkerboard. — Richard Rodriguez

city's anthem, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," was written in 1954 by two gay lovers who were pining for "the city by the bay" after moving to Brooklyn Heights. — David Talbot

One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mountain just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I had just left there after breakfast. — Rebecca Solnit

San Francisco is a breathtakingly beautiful city, with lots of great contrasts between dark and light, often overlapping each other. It's a great setting for a horror story. — Christopher Moore

Whatever San Francisco is or is not, it is never dull. Life there is in a perpetual ferment. It is as though the city kettle had been set on the stove to boil half a century ago and had never been taken off. The steam is pouring out of the nose. The cover is dancing up and down. The very kettle is rocking and jumping. But by some miracle the destructive explosion never happens. — Inez Haynes Irwin

Elsewhere, evidence of callousness to the homeless is even more blatant. As just one example, Hawaii state representative Tom Brower proudly goes hunting for homeless people who have filled shopping carts with their meager belongings; upon finding them, Brower, who says he's "disgusted" by the homeless, smashes their carts with a sledgehammer.70 Even in relatively "liberal" San Francisco, the city's main Catholic Church has installed a sprinkler system to drench homeless folks who occasionally sleep in the doorways.71 And recently, Alaska Congressman Don Young suggested that if wolves were introduced into communities where they weren't currently to be found, those areas "wouldn't have a homeless problem anymore."72 It is no doubt this kind of visceral contempt that animates the recent rise in hateful assaults upon the homeless around the nation. — Tim Wise

I've always had a connection here in the city from the first day I arrived. I stayed in the city. I made San Francisco my home. I was seen in the offseason at a lot of different functions, and people liked that. — Willie McCovey

I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love. — Rebecca Solnit

Perhaps after all the most breathtaking quality about San Francisco is these unexpected glimpses that you are always getting of beautiful hill-heights and beautiful valley-depths ... City lights, like nests of diamonds, glitter and glisten in the depths of those valleys. — Inez Haynes Irwin

In a city like San Francisco, you can throw a rock out your front door and hit someone with a nice ass and pretty brown eyes. But to find someone you want to fall asleep with, someone you want to breathe and dream next to, is terribly rare. — Christopher Baer Will

Adeline lived in San Francisco. San Francisco had two distinctions: (1) It was the most beautiful city in America. (2) It was filled with the most annoying people in America.

It had always been like this, from the beginning.

The merit of any moment in San Francisco could be measured by a simple question: was the beauty of the city outweighing its annoying citizens? — Jarett Kobek

No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living. — William, Saroyan

God! I loove this city! — Herb Caen

Glanced up and saw a pair of kites, red with long blue tails, soaring in the sky. They danced high above the trees on the west end of the park, over the windmills, floating side by side like a pair of eyes looking down on San Francisco, the city I now call home. — Khaled Hosseini

In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality. — Tom Peters

The city of San Francisco engulfed their view through the front windshield. The dazzling light of the late morning sun transformed every glass and metal surface into a silvery mirage. — Victoria Kahler

I think that chain stores in general are really super depressing and I think it really sucks the life out of a city such as San Francisco. — Chicken John

San Francisco has always been my favorite booing city. I don't mean the people boo louder or longer, but there is a very special intimacy. When they boo you, you know they mean you. Music, that's what it is to me. One time in Kezar Stadium they gave me a standing boo. — George Halas

I went to grad school in San Francisco, and then left for New York City with my eye on Broadway. I had saved $5000, which seemed like a lot of money in my mind ... until I realized it was going to take $2500 to get to New York and then the first and last month's rent. — Anika Noni Rose

As Mayor of San Francisco, I will work hard to ensure that, in the event of natural or man-made disasters, San Franciscans are prepared and our City is protected. — Gavin Newsom

Ii do not walk with alienation everywhere I go in the world. I have been to small taverns in rural Ohio, big city bars, San Francisco bath houses, and in all these have felt welcome and happy. But walking through that sunglassed throng, I felt like a Martian. I didn't hate the feeling - indeed, being a black woman in the academy, it wasn't new to me - but it was interesting. I kept wondering: where is the performance? When will the performance start? Is this the performance - me walking through this space without sunglasses with all these Nordic quasi-hipster white people in multi-colored, motorcycle cop sunglasses? — Gabrielle Civil

Of all American cities of whatever size the most friendly on preliminary inspection, and on further acquaintance the most likable. The happiest-hearted, the gayest, the most care-free city on this continent. — Irvin S. Cobb

Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten. — A.J. Liebling

The San Francisco police force was deeply implicated in the murders of Moscone and Milk. Dan White was not carrying out SFPD orders that morning in city hall, but he was carrying out the department's will. He was no longer on the force, but he was one of them: their star ballplayer, their political representative, their brother. He knew all about the cops' murderous feelings toward the city's liberal leadership. He felt the same way. They had the will, he had the willpower. — David Talbot

But Brooklyn, in fact, was the third-largest city in America and had been for some time. It was a major manufacturing center - for glass, steel, tinware, marble mantels, hats, buggy whips, chemicals, cordage, whiskey, beer, glue. It was a larger seaport than New York, a larger city than Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and growing faster than any of them - faster even than — David McCullough

The final assault on the old city arrived via the interstate highway system. In 1956 the Federal-Aid Highway Act funneled billions of tax dollars into the construction of new freeways, including dozens of wide new roads that would push right into the heart of cities. This - along with federal home mortgage subsidies and zoning that effectively prohibited any other kind of development but sprawl - rewarded Americans who abandoned downtowns and punished those who stayed behind, with freeways cutting swaths through inner-city neighborhoods from Baltimore to San Francisco. Anyone who could afford to get out, did. — Charles Montgomery

San Francisco is a city with the assets of a metropolis without the disadvantages of size and industry. — Jack Kenny

I did this movie with Spike Lee called 'Sucker Free City,' and that would have to be my favorite role by far. It was just so much fun to work with Spike and shoot in San Francisco. — Anthony Mackie

I love San Francisco, and it offers spectacular scenery of the city, and it adds to the uplifting quality of the movie. — Tommy Wiseau

I'm proud to have been a Yankee. But I have found more happiness and contentment since I came back home to San Francisco than any man has a right to deserve. This is the friendliest city in the world. — Joe DiMaggio

I expected Los Angeles to be slick and modern, but overall it had a rundown look and feel to it. Sort of like Denver. Sort of like every city in America I've lived in, except San Francisco, which looks cool. — Gary Reilly

But of course there's no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It's the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons — Dave Eggers

Cities are like gentlemen, they are born, not made. You are either a city, or you are not, size has nothing to do with it. I bet San Francisco was a city from the very first time it had a dozen settlers. New York is "Yokel", but San Francisco is "City at Heart". — Will Rogers

The cool, grey city of love. — George Sterling

'I think you ought to go to New York or Chicago or San Francisco or any city with character and vitality. You should go to work. This place is no good for you, Randy. The air is like soup and the people are like noodles. You're vegetating. I don't want a vegetable. I want a man.' - Lib McGovern — Pat Frank

How is San Francisco, Alex? Lovely city. Will you leave your heart there? Do you think it's a good place to die? — James Patterson

From the explanatory notes that Willson wrote to accompany his symphony, A Symphony of San Francisco,: "Generally speaking, the first movement is intended to convey pioneer courage, loyalty, strength of purpose and freedom." The trumpet motive in the closing Allegro "is a call of defiance to the very elements themselves that had the temerity to dispute the spiritual strength and courage of the golden city of the West." — Meredith Willson

There are a thousand viewpoints in the viewtiful city. — Herb Caen

No other city in the U.S. can divest the visitor of so much money with so little enthusiasm. In Dallas, they take away with gusto; in New Orleans, with a bow; in San Francisco, with a wink and a grin. In New York, you're lucky if you get a grunt. — Fletcher Knebel

Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic; San Francisco is a lady — Norman Mailer

The City that knows how. — William Howard Taft

I wish the city of San Francisco, bastion of liberalism, were more innovative when it comes to how to spread the wealth. — Leila Janah

To me ... San Francisco is an ideal city, intellectually stimulating and naturally beautiful. The oceans and forests are close enough to refresh the spirit; the architecture is always exciting. — Ruth Bernhard

San Francisco is a city of twenty-something millionaire white kids named Doug. — Tom Lehrer

San Francisco is a city that requires a fine pair of legs, a city of cliffs misnamed as hills, honeycombed with a fine webbing of showy houses that cling to the slanted streets with the fierceness of abalones. — Pat Conroy

I certainly was surprised to be named Poet Laureate of this far-out city on the left side of the world, and I gratefully accept, for as I told the Mayor, "How could I refuse?" I'd rather be Poet Laureate of San Francisco than anywhere because this city has always been a poetic center, a frontier for free poetic life, with perhaps more poets and more poetry readers than any city in the world. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

San Francisco was her favorite. It was the kind of city where being independent was valued, not pitied or regarded as a problem to be rectified by well-meaning friends. — Susan Wiggs

and were willing to suffer pain if necessary." A young woman in the spring and summer of 1967 was walking toward a door just as that door was springing open. A stage was set for her adulthood that was so accommodatingly extreme - so whimsical, sensual, and urgent - that behavior that in any other era would carry a penalty for the daring was shielded and encouraged. There was safety in numbers for every gorgeous madness; good girls wanting to be bad hadn't had so much cover since the Jazz Age. San Francisco - glowing with psychedelic mystique, the whole city plastered with Fillmore and Avalon posters of tangle-haired goddess girls - was preparing for a convocation (of hapless runaways from provincial suburbs, it would turn out), the Summer of Love, through which the term "flower children" would be coined, while in harsh, emotion-sparking contrast, helicopters were dropping thousands of U.S. boys into the swamps of Vietnam. — Sheila Weller

Vancouver is the most wonderful place. I put it up there with San Francisco and Sydney as a kind of magic sort of harbor city. — Terence Stamp

I started sfCiti because I believed that technology companies needed to take a 'One City' approach and build a shared sense of community and civic responsibility in San Francisco. — Ron Conway

Sometimes it was hard to breathe, knowing how small my world could be. Maybe in San Francisco it wouldn't feel like the universe was conspiring to keep me in a bubble. — Heather Demetrios

I think Hitchcock had a thing about hills: think of the house on the hill in 'Psycho.' Then, in 'Vertigo,' Scottie is forever traversing the city, going downhill all the time as he goes deeper and deeper into himself. It's as if Hitchcock is using San Francisco as a psychological map. — Allen Coulter

If San Francisco is indeed a city of leaders, then I think we should lead, and if we don't want a chain store, then we should say so loudly. — Chicken John

The 1890s was a decade when life began to change in urban America. Modern conveniences that we now take for granted came into use; women's roles became less restrictive; and San Francisco, a port city with influences from all over the world, was a lively place in which to reside. — Marcia Muller

New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities - in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East — John Gregory Dunne

It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears
is said to be seen in San Francisco.
It must be a delightful city and possess
all the attractions of the next world — Oscar Wilde

The extreme geniality of San Francisco's economic, intellectual and political climate makes it the most varied and challenging city in the United States. — James A. Michener

San Francisco has a flowers-in-your-hair kind of vibe, while Chicago's got this very funny, big-city/small-town coolness to it. — Dave Matthews

San Francisco is the only city in America where marijuana is legal but plastic bags are not. — Conan O'Brien

With this house. Placing his hand on the cool metal handle on the door of his black Bentley, he barely heard the familiar click as the catch released. And as he climbed into the seat, he was oblivious to the fresh, pungent smell of the smooth leather upholstery. Pulling quickly out of the driveway, Rafe began heading the short distance to the city, where he had a condo a couple of blocks from his office building. Luckily, Sharron had refused to live in San Francisco, causing him to sleep there on the many late nights he'd worked. The apartment was his - his — Melody Anne

For 25 years, it has been my privilege to represent the city of San Francisco and the great state of California; to work to strengthen our vibrant middle class; to secure opportunity and equality. — Nancy Pelosi

Two days in this city is worth two months in New York. — Robert Menzies

I was born and raise din San Francisco, which explains my willingness to stay in a city that's historically been full of people who insist on trying to kill me at the slightest provocation. — Seanan McGuire

In San Francisco one felt the spirit of optimism and enterprise. Los Angeles, on the other hand, was an ugly city, hot and oppressive, and the people looked sallow and anaemic. It was a much warmer climate but had not the freshness of San Francisco; nature has endowed the north of California with resources that will endure and flourish when Hollywood has disappeared into the prehistoric tar-pits of Wilshire Boulevard. — Charlie Chaplin

Landlords - many of whom were absentee, and many were Chinese - hated my guts. They saw me coming and said, 'There's that Communist Ed Lee!'" The housing battles of the 1970s were the crucible for an entire generation of new activists in San Francisco. The city was a finite peninsula of competing dreams and ambitions. Was it to become a Manhattan of the West, whose office towers and high-rise apartment buildings overshadowed everything else, or remain an affordable, human-scale city of light nestled into the hills and hollows? — David Talbot

As mayor of San Francisco, I will provide the vision and work hard to make San Francisco a beautiful, well-planned city with excellent housing and transportation options. — Gavin Newsom

San Francisco is the only city I can think of that can survive all the things you people are doing to it and still look beautiful. — Frank Lloyd Wright

And that question is, is San Francisco just a boutique city? A theme park? Or do creative forces still coalesce there? — Kevin Starr

I fell in love with the most cordial and sociable city in the Union. — Mark Twain

The distance between Mooreland in 1965 and a city like San Francisco in 1965 is roughly equivalent to the distance starlight must travel before we look up casually from a cornfield and see it. — Haven Kimmel

I never dreamed I'd like any city as well as London. San Francisco is exciting, moody, exhilarating. I even love the muted fogs. — Julie Christie

If you're alive, you can't be bored in San Francisco. If you're not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life ... San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure. It is a city in which the spirit can know refreshment every day. — William, Saroyan

San Francisco can no longer afford to be a city divided between downtown and neighborhoods, with a downtown that becomes a ghost town when workers go home for the evening. — Gavin Newsom