Quotes & Sayings About The City Chicago

I'd grown up in the U.K., where the surveillance apparatus went into place in the 1970s in response to the Troubles with the IRA. When I was a kid, we moved to Chicago, and I was surprised to see you could live in a large city in which you didn't have cameras on every street corner. — Jonathan Nolan

I've officially turned into a loser," she whispered cynically. "I'm looking forward to going home and having cereal for dinner and walking Mitchell and studying a little and then going to sleep. I've had my 'going out and having fun' quota for the year, I guess, and it's June. — Daniel Amory

I'm not really looking forward to wearing a black rubber suit in the summertime in humid Chicago. If you see a pool of sweat through the city, follow it and you will find me. — Christian Bale

Chicago is the greatest of all baseball cities. I make no exception, although I have been treated well wherever I have been. It is the greatest city because the fans will stick to a loser season after season. I have had my share of defeats, so I should know. — Charles Comiskey

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

Don't you think most of those kids think too much about who got an A or a B when they were in law school and what that means to an inflated G.P.A. and not enough about the world? asked Connor irrelevantly. — Daniel Amory

CM has always stood for one thing: Chicago Made. Chick Magnet? That's preposterous. Girls don't like me. I was born and raised in Chicago. The city made me. Punk is just because I've always been a smart-mouthed, wise-ass punk. I still am. I was the guy, if a bunch of football players were messing with one of my friends, I'd walk over there and spit in their face. — CM Punk

Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt. — Studs Terkel

The last copy of the Chicago Daily News I picked up had three crime stories on its front page. But by comparison to the gaudy days, this is small-time stuff. Chicago is as full of crooks as a saw with teeth, but the era when they ruled the city is gone forever. — John Gunther

It's very freaky in Chicago.There's something in the water there, I don't know what it is. But the actual word Chicago means, in the Indian language, garlic. It was just garlic and mosquitoes there.And that is the roughest city on the planet, and I been to every place in the world. — Quincy Jones

A friend told me about the casting notice for 'Queer Eye.' I was in Chicago and I had a contract with 'Esquire' magazine, so had been coming to New York City regularly and thought I'd catch a cheap flight, crash on a friend's sofa and do this hilarious audition that I had no chance of winning. — Ted Allen

It was a generation growing in its disillusionment about the deepening recession and the backroom handshakes and greedy deals for private little pots of gold that created the largest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. As heirs to the throne, we all knew, of course, how bad the economy was, and our dreams, the ones we were told were all right to dream, were teetering gradually toward disintegration. However, on that night, everyone seemed physically at ease and exempt from life's worries with final exams over and bar class a distant dream with a week before the first lecture, and as I looked around at the jubilant faces and loud voices, if you listened carefully enough you could almost hear the culmination of three years in the breath of the night gasp in an exultant sigh as if to say, Law school was over at last! — Daniel Amory

Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world. — Frank Lloyd Wright

The sixteen hundred dairies in California's Central Valley alone produce more waste than a city of twenty-one million people-that's more than the populations of London, New York, and Chicago combined. — Gene Baur

Mister Dresden," he said. "And Miss Rodriguez, I believe. I didn't realize you were an art collector."
"I am the foremost collector of velvet Elvii in the city of Chicago," I said at once.
"Elvii?" Marcone inquired.
"The plural could be Elvises, I guess," I said. "But if I say that too often, I start muttering to myself and calling things 'my precious,' so I usually go with the Latin plural. — Jim Butcher

The thing about Chicago is that it really isn't like any other place. The architecture and the layout of the city are the best. I'm from the Midwest, and consider myself a Midwesterner. I feel most at home there. I love California. I have great friends in California. I just have always considered Illinois to be home. — Vince Vaughn

I drug your ghost across the country, and we plotted out my death. Every city and memory we whispered "Here is where you rest." Well I was determined in Chicago but I dug my teeth into my knees And I settled for a telephone, sang into your machine: "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. — Conor Oberst

Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto. — Ivan Illich

I've called Chicago home for nearly 25 years. It's a city of broad shoulders and big hearts and bold dreams; a city of legendary sports figures, legendary sports venues, and legendary sports fans; a city like America itself, where the world
the world's races and religions and nationalities come together and reach for the dream that brought them here. — Barack Obama

I was born October 5, 1957, on the South Side of Chicago, in the Woodlawn area, a neighborhood that hasn't changed much in forty-five years. Our house was on 66th and Blackstone, but the city tore it down when the rats took over. — Bernie Mac

From its aptly noirish title on, Martin Preib's The Wagon has rightness of authenticity about it. From the perspective of a cop he fashions a compelling view of the Chicago Algren once called 'the dark city.' There's a unique quality to his essays which manage to be broodingly meditative even as their narrative drive keeps you turning pages. — Stuart Dybek

The Illinois Constitution was written before they realized they'd have a city the size of Chicago in the state. The constitution had severe limits on the ability of any city to raise monies through taxes and bonds. When Chicago grew explosively, they had to come up with ways of getting more money to do more things. — Gary Krist

My favorite big city would have to be Chicago. I lived in Indiana for several years and would always go into the city with my family for Cubs games or to visit the aquarium and museums on field trips. — Karen Fairchild

I was born in Evanston, about three blocks away from the Chicago border. My mother, at the time, was finishing her Ph.D. in African History at Northwestern University. Soon after my birth, my parents split, and my father moved to Wicker Park, which is on the north side of the city. — Rashid Johnson

The Council Wars era from 1983 to 1986 and the brief months from 1986 to 1987 when Mayor Washington gained control over the council were among the most dramatic periods in Chicago's history. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, and homosexuals gained real power at City Hall for the first time. Opposition to Reaganomics and support for the city as a nuclear weapons-free zone were led by the mayor and his department heads, not just opposition groups. The growth machine of the old Chicago regime, which favored urban growth focused on major public works projects and development in the downtown Loop area, was replaced by a balanced program of neighborhood, as well as downtown, economic development.33 — Dick Simpson

It is still the arena of those who dream of the City of Man and those who envision a City of Things. The battle appears to be forever joined. The armies, ignorant and enlightened, clash by day as well as night. Chicago is America's dream, writ large. And flamboyantly. — Studs Terkel

The Chicago City News Bureau was a tripwire for all the newspapers in town when I was there, and there were five papers, I think. We were out all the time around the clock and every time we came across a really juicy murder or scandal or whatever, they'd send the big time reporters and photographers, otherwise they'd run our stories. So that's what I was doing, and I was going to university at the same time. — Kurt Vonnegut

For me, I was really lucky to go to a city like Chicago where the team was struggling at the time, and I was able to go in and play right away. — Patrick Kane

What city has given the world more in terms of American culture than New Orleans? There is none. Not New York. Not L.A. Not Chicago. Not anywhere, in the sense that African American music has gone around the world twenty times over, and it's continuing to evolve. It is our greatest cultural export. — David Simon

Last Saturday night I was in a club on the South Side of Chicago listening to live rock music and talking to a guitar playing veteran of the music scene in the city. He looked and talked like the musicians that I recall from my childhood; he was a thin, cigarette smoking, avant garde and interesting guy. We got to talking about a life in the relatively risky creative arts and he said, "Look, you could get that safe job and spend your whole life that way, but what are you waiting for? When you're ninety-six years old and have three days left? Is that when you decide to do what you love? — Jamie Freveletti

First of all, I want you to think of the city as a collection of people. That's easy, right? You think of Minneapolis or Chicago or Milwaukee, you think of hundreds of thousands of people. Millions of people. That's what you think of right away. Maybe you think of sky-scrapers too, I don't know. But I think of people. The next thing you should think about is ideas. Think of each of those millions of people as a set of ideas. Like, That woman is a ballerina, she thinks about ballet. Or, that man is an architect, he thinks about buildings. If you begin thinking about it that way, a city is the greatest place in the world. It's millions of people, brushing up against one another, exchanging ideas, all the time, at every hour of the day. — Nickolas Butler

Chicago is unique. It is the only completely corrupt city in America. — Charles Edward Merriam

[Chicago] is the greatest and most typically American of all cities. New York is bigger and more spectacular and can outmatch it in other superlatives, but it is a "world" city, more European in some respects than American. — John Gunther

In our national mythology, we seem to include only one-way migrations to the great capitol cities. The journey from the small Wisconsin town or Minnesota city to Chicago or New York or Los Angeles. Certainly for some people, that journey is a round trip. — Mona Simpson

the Occupy Movement flared up and began setting up tents in public parks all around the nation, from New York City to Chicago to Seattle. But it actually happened exactly eighty years earlier, when the nation was drowning in President Hoover's Great Depression, and not President Bush's Great Recession. These settlements weren't called "occupations" at the time, they were called "Hoovervilles. — Thom Hartmann

I have a place in Chicago and I get there as much as I can ... The city is so unbelievably beautiful. It's one of the greatest cities on the planet. My heart beats differently when I'm in Chicago. It slows down and I feel more at ease. — Jeremy Piven

I pledge tonight to be Mayor for all of the people of this city - for one Chicago. — Jane Byrne

Everybody would love to be mayor of Chicago. If you look at what we have done over many, many years and where we are today and the commitment by the business community, the commitment by the not-for-profit community - all this coming together - this is a wonderful city. — Richard M. Daley

Chicago has been characterized as the most segregated city in the United States, a city they said could never change. — Harold Washington

I was always very curious about what a scientist's life was like when I was young. Of course, when I was young, you didn't have very many opportunities to find out with no web, TV. I was very lucky: I was born in the city of Chicago and went to the University of Chicago where I actually saw things. — James D. Watson

Before the Great Chicago Fire, no one took notice of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary, two Irish immigrants who lived with their five children on the city's West Side. — Karen Abbott

To romp along the connected rooftops and fire escapes of Chicago's second city of garages was my young life's passion. — Lynn Margulis

That underlay the city of Chicago. — Jim Butcher

Chicago is the Great American City, and it was really great to live there during a time of economic expansion and opportunity and growth. I felt like I was living at the center of the world. Unlike New York, no one expects you to be a professional writer. — John Green

Do you want to achieve something or do you just want to make money?" asked a nearby man in a white shirt to another man in a striped shirt. I waited for the answer as I slowly walked past them.
"Why is it an either or question?" the man in the striped shirt finally murmured philosophically under a sip of beer. They both stood there looking at each other in thought. — Daniel Amory

From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene, broken by intervals of begged and stolen rides, on trains and trucks, and on country wagons with he at twenty and twentyfive and thirty sitting on the seat with his still, hard face and the clothes (even when soiled and worn) of a city man and the driver of the wagon not knowing who or what the passenger was and not daring to ask. The street ran into Oklahoma and Missouri and as far south again as Mexico and then back north to Chicago and Detroit and then back south again and at last to Mississippi. It was fifteen years long. — William Faulkner

Can a mordern city burn,' he asked Tom. 'One made mostly of concrete and metal and glass? Could it burn the way Chicago did after Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over the lantern? — Stephen King

On March 30, 1890, an officer of the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of "our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances." The — Erik Larson

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning ... proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation. — Carl Sandburg

Tonight - by taking this solemn oath - I am no longer a private citizen but the Mayor of the City of Chicago. — Jane Byrne

My first day in Chicago, September 4, 1983. I set foot in this city, and just walking down the street, it was like roots, like the motherland. I knew I belonged here. — Oprah Winfrey

Unlike New York or Chicago, once you were inside Boston, any point in the city was fairly convenient to any other. — Matthew Pearl

I really wanted to go to a city and get involved in a theater scene and a theater community. I had some friends who had moved out to Chicago and had said really good things about it and about the work. I didn't care at that time about making money. — Timothy Simons

I wrote my first novel and my second novel in Chicago. It was the place where I became a writer. It's my favorite city. — John Green

I've reported murders, scandals, marriages, premieres and national political conventions. I've been amused, intrigued, outraged, enthralled and exasperated by Chicago. And I've come to love this American giant, viewing it as the most misunderstood, most underrated city in the world. There is none other quite like my City of Big Shoulders. — Irv Kupcinet

I have struck a city - a real city - and they call it Chicago. The other places don't count. Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages — Rudyard Kipling

I want to be on that team that wins the world championship here in Chicago and sees the city go crazy. — Derrek Lee

York boss William Barnes issued an acid personal attack: "Mr. Roosevelt's departure for Chicago was inevitable. Undignified as it is, and impotent as it will prove to be, its chief interest lies in the disclosure of the mania for power over which Mr. Roosevelt has no control." The people of Chicago greeted the arrival of Theodore Roosevelt quite differently; word that Roosevelt was en route drove the city "plum crazy" with excitement. Ordinary business was suspended as tens of thousands made plans to celebrate Roosevelt's arrival. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

I cannot watch the city of Chicago be destroyed by petty politics and bad government. — Harold Washington

What a place to put a city, right on the front line of absolute zero. No wonder a cow burned it down. — Mark Helprin

Chicago - this vicious, stinking zoo, this mean-grinning, Mace-smelling boneyard of a city; an elegant rockpile monument to everything cruel and stupid and corrupt in the human spirit. — Hunter S. Thompson

Chicago does not go to the world, the world comes to Chicago! Who needs New York? Who has taller buildings than our tall buildings? Who's got a busier airport than our airport? You want Picasso? We got Picasso, big Picasso. Nobody can make heads or tails of it. It's a lion? No, a seahorse. Looks to me like a radiator with wings. Who gives a damn, people, a Picasso's a Picasso. — Peter Orner

Place has always been important to me, and one thing today's Chicago exudes, as it did in 1893, is a sense of place. I fell in love with the city, the people I encountered, and above all the lake and its moods, which shift so readily from season to season, day to day, even hour to hour. — Erik Larson

As it happens, Chicago is the nation's leader in municipal privatization efforts. That's right: The city that conservatives portray as the citadel of the power-grabbing, government-growing left has been selling itself off in pieces for years. It signed a 99-year lease for the Chicago Skyway, a toll road in the city's South Side, back in 2005. — Thomas Frank

I came out of the old Second City in Chicago. Chicago actors are more hard-nosed. They're tough on themselves and their fellow actors. They're self-demanding. — Bill Murray

Look, girls know when they're cute," he said. "You don't have to tell them. All they need to do is look in the mirror. I have one friend out in New York, an attorney. She moved out there after the school year to take the bar. She doesn't have a job. I was like, 'How are you going to get a job there in this market?' And she's like, 'I'll wink and I'll smile.' She's a pretty girl. Whether that works despite her poor grades is yet to be seen. — Daniel Amory

The city divided by the river is further divided by racial and lingual differences. — Nelson Algren

There are fewer Arabs in Tel Aviv, one of the largest cities in the Middle East, than there are in Chicago, the largest city in the American Midwest. How do you accomplish such a remarkable feat of social engineering without massive violence? — Max Blumenthal

I majored in theater in college. I did a couple of plays in high school, and I really enjoyed it, so I went to Illinois Wesleyan University and got a degree, and then I went back to Chicago and started doing theater in all the companies around the city for about 11 years before I moved out to L.A. — Kevin Dunn

Right away when I got to college, I realized that being a politician sucks. It's really hard! It wasn't for me. B.J. Novak is convinced that I will run for mayor of Chicago at some point. He begs me to do it. It'd be a tough gig, but I was always very attracted to the idea of helping people and trying to make the city a better place. — Ike Barinholtz

That weekend the city blushed with a great heat wave but on Monday it rained, cooling the ache in the street's burn. — Daniel Amory

And Kansas City is at Chicago tonight, or is it Chicago at Kansas City? Well, no matter as Kansas City leads in the eighth 4 to 4. — Jerry Coleman

Incredible amounts of energy are hidden in your brain;
enough in a gram of flesh to run the city of Chicago for 2 days.
And you say you are tired? — Paramahansa Yogananda

I remember when I was twenty-five," he said. "No client comes to you when you're twenty-five. It's like when you are looking for a doctor. You don't want the new one that just graduated. You don't want the very old one, the one shaking, the one twenty years past his prime. You want the seasoned one who has done it so many times he can do it in his sleep though. Same thing with attorneys. — Daniel Amory

I joined an improv group in college, which was a lot of fun. After I graduated, I moved to Chicago to try to get into the Second City. — Steve Carell

Indeed, Chicago seems to have literally sucked the air out of Springfield: another case of American becoming a network of massive city-states more intimately interconnected with other continents than with their own hinterlands. It is in the merging with the rest of the world and global civilization that the forces of division come to the fore at home. Springfield: another small city that should inspire but doesn't. — Robert D. Kaplan

The fire was barely fifteen minutes old. What followed was a series of fatal errors that set the fire free and doomed the city to a fiery death. — Jim Murphy

To my relief, Laura laughs. "It's the same everywhere. Most lesbian bars in Chicago closed years ago. And that's in a city of almost three million. Gay bars aplenty, though I hear their number is dwindling as well, but lesbian bars just can't seem to stay afloat." "It's because we're cheap dates." "And there's too much on television." "And the cat isn't going to feed itself," I add, enjoying this moment so much because it tells me we are still friends. The awkwardness of having asked Laura on a date has passed. — Harper Bliss

If you stand still in any city long enough, you see everyone pass you by. So you're in Chicago. If you stand on the corner of Belmont and Clark, and you do that for three years, you'll pretty much have seen everybody in Chicago pass that junction. — Glen Hansard

One will feel the same subtle nausea coming into the city or waiting to depart from it that one feels now in such plastic catacombs as O'Hare's reception center in Chicago. — Norman Mailer

I am surprised that Chicago - the Big-Shouldered City - is so trifling that they won't let you eat in a restaurant if it's on fire. Even if you already paid. — Jill Conner Browne

I grew up, until age 6, in Chicago. My parents rented their apartment and, at the end of the Depression, my parents wanted to replicate that situation. So, again, we lived in a somewhat suburban setting outside of New York City, and again, they rented. — Edmund Phelps

When I first got out of school, I went on a children's theater tour, and I went around the country a little bit that fall, and it was the first time I went to Chicago. We spend a couple of days in Chicago, and I was really struck viscerally by the city. — Allison Tolman

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, and I love that. It's cool to have different foods from all over the world within a stone's throw of my house. — Rick Bayless

My parents didn't really understand too much about sport. At that time, we were in a Polish community in the inner city of Chicago, and I was the youngest of a bunch of cousins. Polish families are real big, with cousins and aunts and uncles. — Mike Krzyzewski

You know, sometimes I think this is just not it," he said, his glasses flashing from the early night's light.
He turned toward me in a thoughtful pause.
"You know what I mean, Tom?" he asked. "It's just not. — Daniel Amory

Aided by the young George Pullman, who would later make a fortune building railway cars, Chesbrough launched one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the nineteenth century. Building by building, Chicago was lifted by an army of men with jackscrews. As the jackscrews raised the buildings inch by inch, workmen would dig holes under the building foundations and install thick timbers to support them, while masons scrambled to build a new footing under the structure. Sewer lines were inserted beneath buildings with main lines running down the center of streets, which were then buried in landfill that had been dredged out of the Chicago River, raising the entire city almost ten feet on average. Tourists walking around downtown Chicago today regularly marvel at the engineering prowess on display in the city's spectacular skyline; what they don't realize is that the ground beneath their feet is also the product of brilliant engineering. — Steven Johnson

One of the professors told me last week that he feels bad teaching with the way the economy is now. 'What's the point?' he said. 'Kids aren't getting jobs.' You never hear faculty talk that way. He did. — Daniel Amory

Should I have a doughnut or my disgusting cardboard?" asked Gwynn, as she drew up languidly before me at a study table in a bookstore on State Street, raising a puffed rice cake in the air.
My eyes narrowed attentively at her face, but as I hesitated, she announced eagerly, "Disgusting cardboard it is! — Daniel Amory

I am here before you tonight to dedicate this administration to bringing a new renaissance of neighborhood life and community spirit, a renewal of confidence in the future of our city and a revival of opportunity for all Chicago. — Jane Byrne

While Mayor Daley surprised me today with his decision to not run for reelection, I have never been surprised by his leadership, dedication and tireless work on behalf of the city and the people of Chicago. — Rahm Emanuel

The stars glittered in the sky and as the number of people at the party grew there were merging conversations and laughter and bodies moving in outlines around the kegs of beer in a curtsy of youth. — Daniel Amory

I will have both of you," he said. "My Sentinel and my city. And the GP will learn exactly how stubborn we both can be. — Chloe Neill

Chicago's downtown seems to me to constitute, all in all, the best-looking twentieth-century city, the city where contemporary technique has best been matched by artistry, intelligence, and comparatively moderated greed. No doubt about it, if style were the one gauge, Chicago would be among the greatest of all the cities of the world. — Jan Morris

A city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness. — Nelson Algren

My sense, although I don't remember discussing it with anyone, was that with the fall of France to the Nazis in June 1940, European civilization had collapsed. I also recalled that although both George Herbert Mead and John Dewey had been born in New England, they developed their distinctively American philosophy of pragmatism in Chicago. So thinking of my own New England roots, I decided to go to Chicago, which, seen through Carl Sandburg's eyes, was the opposite of European decadence: Hog Butcher for the World, Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler, Stormy, husky, brawling. City of the Big Shoulders.7 — Grace Lee Boggs

I don't think I've ever referred to any girl I dated as my girlfriend. I think that would freak me out. Even the girl that I dated for two years in college I don't think I ever referred to her as my girlfriend."
"How would you introduce her?" I asked.
"I'm just going to say her name," he said. — Daniel Amory

He spent two years running a hospital for Chai." Molly put her arm around the younger woman. "Which was the equivalent of working the ER in a city like New York or Chicago. He saved a lot of lives." She made sure Max was paying attention, too. "And before you say, 'Yeah, of drug runners, killers, and thieves,' you should also know that his patients were just regular people who worked for Chai because he was the only steady employer in the area. Or because they knew they'd end up in some mass grave if they refused his offer of employment. Before Grady came in, if they were injured in some battle with a rival gang, they were just left for dead."
Jones looked up to find Max watching him as he sterilized a particularly sharp knife. "Me and Jesus," he said. "So much alike, people often get us confused. — Suzanne Brockmann

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

Nuclear warfare is not necessary to cause a breakdown of our society. You take a large city like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago-their water supply comes from hundreds of miles away and any interruption of that, or food, or power for any period of time, you're going to have riots in the streets. Our society is so fragile, so dependent on the interworking of things to provide us with goods and services, that you don't need nuclear warfare to fragment us anymore than the Romans needed it to cause their eventual downfall. — Gene Roddenberry