Neighborhoods Quotes

As spirits roam the neighborhoods at night,
Let loose upon the Earth till it be light ... ~ Nick Gordon

Even at the very dawn of Christianity, there was a commonly-accepted theory known as the Blood Libel, which stated matter-of-factly that Jewish people regularly sacrificed non-Jewish babies and used the blood of those babies in Judaic rituals. Later, in medieval times, plagues and other diseases were commonly blamed on Jews, resulting in the enforcement of Apartheid-like conditions, separating Jewish communities from the rest of the population throughout Europe. For example, in the Papal States – territories in the Italian Peninsula that existed throughout the middle ages and medieval times that were governed directly by the Pope – Jews were only allowed to reside in neighborhoods called ghettos. They were regularly forced to convert to Christianity in various barbaric ways such as involuntary baptisms. The stealing of Jewish babies from their parents by Church officials was also not uncommon and the children would often then be brought up as Catholic orphans never knowing of their Jewish heritage. ~ James Morcan

New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. ~ Paul Auster

I coach church planters to look at the ethnic diversity of schools and neighborhoods they are near. This will be an indicator how ethnically diverse their congregation can become. ~ Derwin L. Gray

I sense an insatiable demand for connectivity. Maybe all these people have discovered important uses for the Internet. Perhaps some of them feel hungry for a community that our real neighborhoods don't deliver. At least a few must wonder what the big deal is. ~ Clifford Stoll

Most of the mosques were built in our cities in recent years because Turkish citizens in those neighborhoods feel a growing need for places to pray. ~ Wolfgang Schauble

Poor communities, frequently communities of color but not exclusively, suffer disproportionately. If you look at where our industrialized facilities tend to be located, they're not in the upper middle class neighborhoods. ~ Carol Browner

As I witness and participate in our visionary efforts to revitalize Detroit and contrast them with the multibillion dollars' worth of megaprojects advanced by politicians and developed that involve casinos, giant stadiums, gentrification, and the Super Bowl, I am saddened by their shortsightedness. At the same time I rejoice in the energy being unleashed in the community by our human-scale programs that involve bringing the country back into the city and removing the walls between schools and communities, between generations, and between ethnic groups. And I am confident just as in the early twentieth century people came from around the world to marvel at the mass production lines pioneered by Henry Ford, in the twenty-first century they will be coming to marvel at the thriving neighborhoods that are the fruit of our visionary programs. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

EVERYONE JOINS A BAND IN THIS LIFE. You are born into your first one. Your mother plays the lead. She shares the stage with your father and siblings. Or perhaps your father is absent, an empty stool under a spotlight. But he is still a founding member, and if he surfaces one day, you will have to make room for him. As life goes on, you will join other bands, some through friendship, some through romance, some through neighborhoods, school, an army. Maybe you will all dress the same, or laugh at your own private vocabulary. Maybe you will flop on couches backstage, or share a boardroom table, or crowd around a galley inside a ship. But in each band you join, you will play a distinct part, and it will affect you as much as you affect it. And, as is usually the fate with bands, most of them will break up - through distance, differences, divorce, or death. ~ Mitch Albom

My ideal city is more like the city (New York and Paris come to mind, but it sort of applies to all) that existed up to and including the 1930s, when different classes lived all together in the same neighborhoods, and most businesses of any sort were mom-and-pop, and people and things had a local identity. ~ Luc Sante

In Chicago, integrated neighborhoods do not stay integrated for long. ~ Bill Dedman

I'm from my hood, and everybody knows me in my neighborhood, and that's cool, I can do what I want over there, but in other people's neighborhoods, I can't. ~ Danny Brown

I was not in a country where my ancestors had been enslaved. I was not stared at when I walked through different neighborhoods either in the day or the evening, no waitress gave me poor service, no one made any snide remarks about my body, and I never heard a racial slur. In short, I was free. ~ Morgan Jerkins

Our Catholic church here split into three pieces: (1) the American Catholic Church whose new Rome is Cicero, Illinois; (2) the Dutch schismatics who believe in relevance but not God; (3) the Roman Catholic remnant, a tiny scattered flock with no place to go. The American Catholic Church, which emphasizes property rights and the integrity of neighborhoods, retained the Latin mass and plays The Star-Spangled Banner at the elevation. ~ Walker Percy

I want you to know that this administration is motivated by a political philosophy that sees the greatness of America in you, her people, and in your families, churches, neighborhoods, communities - the institutions that foster and nourish values like concern for others and respect for the rule of law under God. ~ Ronald Reagan

I was raised to believe that we all have a civic duty and a responsibility as Americans to improve our neighborhoods and our nation. ~ Paul Cook

My style is a little bit different than most conventional Republican Party chairmen. My style is more grass roots-oriented. I'm much more of a street guy. I love hanging out in boardrooms, but I prefer to be in neighborhoods and communities. ~ Michael Steele

The '80s was brand new. It was AIDS. It was gangbanging. It was starting to become big dope-dealing, and crack was starting to flood the neighborhoods. And then you had hip hop, which was something new, other than what we were doing, which was sports, playing football, basketball, baseball. And I was excited. ~ Ice Cube

And after I dropped him off, I took the longest possible route home ... I explored alleys and hidden roads I never knew existed. I discovered neighborhoods entirely new to me. And finally ... I discovered I was sick of this town and everything in it. ~ Jay Asher

Do you imagine, Peter, that your Carpe Diem boots would look any less deluded to them than that guy's Tony Lamas do to you? There's a comeuppance for everyone, wherever you are, and the farther you go from your own fiefdom, the more ludicrous are your haircut, your clothes, your opinions, your life. Within easy walking distance of home are neighborhoods that might as well be in Saigon. ~ Michael Cunningham

I came from a real tough neighborhood. Once a guy pulled a knife on me. I knew he wasn't a professional, the knife had butter on it. ~ Rodney Dangerfield

But his graduate advisor, the eminent poverty scholar William Julius Wilson, promptly sent Venkatesh into the field. His assignment: to visit Chicago's poorest black neighborhoods with a clipboard and a seventy-question, multiple-choice survey. This was the first question on the survey: How do you feel about being black and poor? a. Very bad b. Bad c. Neither bad nor good d. Somewhat good e. Very good ~ Steven D. Levitt

In black neighborhoods, everybody appreciated comedy about real life. In the white community, fantasy was funnier. I started looking for the jokes that were equally hilarious across the board, for totally different reasons. ~ Will Smith

I know when people think of New York, they think of theater, restaurants, cultural landmarks and shopping," I told him. "But beyond the iconic skyline and the news from Wall Street, New York is a collection of villages. In our neighborhoods, we attend school, play Kick the Can, handball and ride our bikes. I grew up knowing the names and faces of the baker, the shoe repair family, the Knish man and the Good Humor man who sold me and the other kids in my neighborhood half a popsicle for a nickel. My father took me to the playground where he pushed me on the swing, helped balance me on the seesaw and watched as I hung upside down by my feet on the monkey bars. Yes," I told the interviewer, "people actually grow up in New York. ~ Gina Greenlee

You grow up inside these neighborhoods and these communities, and you have friends, friends that you love, friends that you grew up with since elementary. And you have their trust, and you have their loyalty. So it brings influence. So no matter how much of a leader I thought I was, I was always under the influence, period. ~ Kendrick Lamar

How do you judge the professionals you patronize? Too many people judge them by display factors. Extra points are given to those who wear expensive clothes, drive luxury automobiles, and live in exclusive neighborhoods. They assume a professional is likely to be mediocre, even incompetent, if he lives in a modest home and drives a three-year-old Ford Crown Victoria. Very, very few people judge the quality of the professionals they use by net worth criteria. Many professionals have told us they must look successful to convince their customers/clients that they are. ~ Thomas J. Stanley

I'm serious. I've got to get people to realize that the government is full of it. Republicans and Democrats want to argue over stuff that's not important, like gay marriage or the war in Iraq or illegal immigration ... When I run - if I run - we're going to talk about real issues like improving our schools, cleaning up our neighborhoods of drugs and crime and making Alabama a better place for all people. ~ Charles Barkley

[I hate] the ways that people want their special needs to be met, whether it's their food allergies or their special lotions or shoes. Or the ways that people want their neighborhoods and restaurants curated in a way that's really tailored to them. Growing up with someone who was living by these very strict, repressive rules for themselves - it made me very allergic to the idea of denial. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Suburban sprawl has heavily damaged the balance of our cities, divorcing environmental context from design and removing the concept of scale from the creation of neighborhoods. ~ Avi Friedman

As a cop trying to anticipate how burglars might use the city, you have to think three-dimensionally. Volumetrically. You have to think in a fundamentally different spatial way about the city laid out below, including how neighborhoods are actually connected and what the most efficient routes might be between them. After all, this is how criminals think, Burdette explained, and this is how they pioneer new geographic ways to escape from you. ~ Geoff Manaugh

Young professionals seeking cities to live and work in, and a wave of immigrants in inner-city neighborhoods and inner suburbs that eventually produced second-generation college graduates who moved into the center city to live and work. These groups joined the gays and artists who have always chosen to live in urban communities.12 Edward Glaeser points out that not all cities have succeeded in the past generation - and he points to Detroit, Michigan, and Leipzig, Germany, as examples. But most cities have found the power to reinvent themselves, argues Glaeser, because the essence of what makes a city a city is the bringing of people together to innovate. At one level, this means bringing together the most highly trained and talented people, the "elites." Yet at another level, it means bringing together the most energetic, ambitious, and risk-taking people from among the ~ Timothy Keller

We can't do much about ensuring that the homeland is safe if our local police and sheriffs' departments don't have the personnel they need to keep our streets and neighborhoods secure. ~ Dick Durbin

(2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter out on the terrazzo floor, eighty-three in all, arranged them like the map of an imaginary city. Some of the piles of paper, I imagined, were freestanding buildings, some were clustered into neighborhoods, and some were open space. On the outskirts, of course, were the tenements
abandoned, ramshackled. The spaces between the piles were the roads, the alleyways, the footpaths, the rivers. The bridges to other neighborhoods, the bridges out ... In this way I could get a sense if one could find their way through the book, if the map I was creating made sense, if it was a place one would want to spend some time in. If one could wander there, if one could get lost. ~ Nick Flynn

Groups that work in black neighborhoods around the country have contended that much of subprime lending is 'predatory lending.' ~ Bill Dedman

Self-styled pioneers braved the dirt and crime of rundown neighborhoods where, in the early 1980s, they could buy as much as five thousand square feet in a dilapidated brownstone for as little as $25,000. ~ Jonathan Soffer

Nevertheless, it is the Christian theory that it is only a regard for this Being -- partly a trembling fear and partly a kind of conciliation represented to be love -- that keeps the human race from roaring downhill to villainy and disaster. Nor are theologians daunted by the obvious fact that many open and even ribald skeptics are not going that way, but, on the contrary, show a considerably higher degree of virtue than the Christian average. Their answer ... is that the moral sense of every such blameless candidate for Hell 'is a kind of parasitic growth upon the otherworldliness of the society in which he lives.' ... Even men who should know better indulge in this confusion between the religious impulse and common decency. ... But this is surely going beyond the plain facts. A man may be truly religious without imagining God as good at all, and he may be good without believing that there is any moral order in the universe or even that God exists. Religion does not necessarily make men better citizens, whether of their neighborhoods or of the world. ~ H.L. Mencken

We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibilities that have been turned over to governments, corporations, and specialists, and put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and household and neighborhoods. ~ Wendell Berry

A month after the fall of the Berlin Wall the US invaded Panama, killing a couple of hundred or maybe a couple of thousand people, destroying poor neighborhoods, reinstating a regime of bankers and narcotraffickers - drug peddling and money laundering shot way up, as congressional research bureaus soon advised - and so on. That's normal, a footnote to history, but there were two differences: one difference is that the pretexts were different. This was the first intervention since the beginning of the Cold War that was not undertaken to defend ourselves from the Russians. This time, it was to defend ourselves from Hispanic narcotraffickers. Secondly, the US recognized right away that it was much freer to invade without any concern that somebody, the Russians, might react somewhere in the world, as former Undersecretary of State Abrams happily pointed out. ~ Noam Chomsky

Crossing a single street transformed the way people talked, determined the size and condition of the homes, the dimension and character of the dreams. ~ Colson Whitehead

I had no idea where he went when he was not with me. Perhaps he enjoyed exploring new places as much as did any living dog, and went off to wander previously unvisited neighborhoods of Magic Beach. ~ Dean Koontz

In neighborhoods without a usable park or playground, the incidence of childhood obesity increases by 29 percent. ~ Darell Hammond

Sometimes, when you grow up in one of these poverty-stricken neighborhoods where the educational system isn't the best, you don't realize that you have any choices. ~ Keke Palmer

It was the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant-a clause in the deed forbidding sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Jesus' fathomless love changes how you and I will live in our moments, how we'll love in our neighborhoods, and what we'll be known for in eternity. ~ Jennifer Dukes Lee

Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, Palo Alto, or Chevy Chase. These places used to have impoverished neighborhoods nearby, but the poor people got chased out by young singles living in group homes, hipsters, and urban homesteading gay couples. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Good neighborhoods, rich with water, thick soil, and - most important - full sunlight, give rise to trees that reach their maximum potential. In contrast, trees in bad neighborhoods never achieve half of that height, never have much of a teenage growth spurt, but focus instead on just holding on, growing at less than half the rate of the more fortunate. During ~ Hope Jahren

Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, 'neighborhood' is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense. ~ Jane Jacobs

When you live in a poor neighborhood, you are living in an area where you have poor schools. When you have poor schools, you have poor teachers. When you have poor teachers, you get a poor education. When you get a poor education, you can only work in a poor-paying job. And that poor-paying job enables you to live again in a poor neighborhood. So, it's a very vicious cycle. ~ Malcolm X

There is plenty to do, for each one of us, working on our own hearts, changing our own attitudes, in our own neighborhoods. ~ Dorothy Day

Do you remember bedtime as a child? I was terrified of the dark. I was terrified of the closed closet door that surely cracked open when I wasn't looking and spewed out ghouls and devils. I took care that no arms or legs protruded from the bed. I sometimes slept with the covers over my head. Sweltering, panting, barely breathing. Not even my hair exposed, lest a monster discover and devour me. I remember begging my father to check under the bed. I remember trying to explain how some monsters had invisibility cloaks. He would kiss my cheek and switch off the light.

We stop looking under the bed once we realize that the monsters are inside us.

It's funny how they transform. Suddenly they don't mind daylight. Suddenly they dress nicely, speak our language, and share our customs. They sit next to us on the metro and jog around our neighborhoods. They slip things into our drinks at parties and offer us jobs. Sometimes we spot them, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we even do the unthinkable: we invite them to our bed. As adults, we burn down the sanctuaries we created as children. Our inner child freaks out, but its screams are drowned by our moans as our monsters bring us to orgasm. ~ Angela Panayotopulos

In this age of consumer activism, pinpoint marketing, and unlimited and immediate information, we want the impossible: products and producers that will assure us that we are fashionable, and that don't pollute, harm animals, or contain weird chemicals, that run on alternative energy, pay their workers good salaries, recycle their scraps, use natural ingredients, buy from local suppliers, donate generously to charity, donate in particular to their neighborhoods, and don't throw their weight around by lobbying. (Or maybe they should lobby for the right causes?) ~ Fran Hawthorne

I had never understood quite so clearly the effective power of Jane Jacob's writing - no, her clear-headed observation - as I did reading "What We See". Maybe that's really the point of writing. That if you take the time to look, to really observe, then you see what is happening, and, with the clarity of that vision, you can act to save neighborhoods. ~ Nancy Milford

St. Louis has a lot of weird food customs that you don't see other places - and a lot of great ethnic neighborhoods. There's a German neighborhood. A great old school Italian neighborhood, with toasted ravioli, which seems to be a St. Louis tradition. And they love provolone cheese in St. Louis. ~ Andy Cohen

now they were expected to walk with a heavy step and newfound power through their neighborhoods. In every other part of the city, however, they were still expected to vanish, or worse. ~ Thomas Mullen

Let's make no mistake about this: The American Dream starts with the neighborhoods. If we wish to rebuild our cities, we must first rebuild our neighborhoods. And to do that, we must understand that the quality of life is more important than the standard of living. To sit on the front steps--whether it's a veranda in a small town or a concrete stoop in a big city--and to talk to our neighborhoods is infinitely more important than to huddle on the living-room lounger and watch a make-believe world in not-quite living color.

...

And I hardly need to tell you that in the 19- or 24-inch view of the world, cleanliness has long since eclipsed godliness. Soon we'll all smell, look, and actually be laboratory clean, as sterile on the inside as on the out. The perfect consumer, surrounded by the latest appliances. The perfect audience, with a ringside seat to almost any event in the world, without smell, without taste, without feel--alone and unhappy in the vast wasteland of our living rooms. I think that what we actually need, of course, is a little more dirt on the seat of our pants as we sit on the front stoop and talk to our neighbors once again, enjoying the type of summer day where the smell of garlic travels slightly faster than the speed of sound. ~ Harvey Milk

When you are interviewing someone, don't just write down what he says. Ask yourself: Does this guy remind you of someone? What does the room feel like? Notice smells, voice inflection, neighborhoods you pass through. Be a cinematographer. ~ Gene Weingarten

Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it's as if the audience--dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing--is part of the band. They are two parts of the same thing. The dancers interpret, or it might be better to say literally embody, the sounds of the band, answering the instruments. Since everyone is listening to different parts of the music--she to the trumpet melody, he to the bass drum, she to the trombone--the audience is a working model in three dimensions of the music, a synesthesic transformation of materials. And of course the band is also watching the dancers, and getting ideas from the dancers' gestures. The relationship between band and audience is in that sense like the relationship between two lovers making love, where cause and effect becomes very hard to see, even impossible to call by its right name; one is literally getting down, as in particle physics, to some root stratum where one is freed from the lockstop of time itself, where time might even run backward, or sideways, and something eternal and transcendent is accessed. ~ Tom Piazza

Just as important as our society as a whole are our small communities: our neighborhoods, workplaces and schools. ~ Jens Stoltenberg

Regarding local residents attempting to ban sex shops from their neighborhoods: You show me a parent who says he's worried about his child's innocence and I'll show you a homeowner trying to maintain equity. ~ George Carlin

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. ~ Truman Capote

MARTHA'S CHEERY VIEW of things was widely shared by outsiders visiting Germany and especially Berlin. The fact was that on most days in most neighborhoods the city looked and functioned as it always had. ~ Erik Larson

You don`t have to do anything. Why worry? It`s all god`s plan anyway. Just love everyone and believe. Be a limp-wristed wimp and recruit others to be the same. But, give unto Caesar that which is Caesar`s. When Caesar says drop bombs on christian babies in Berlin, or Muslim babies in Iraq, it`s okay. When Caesar says open your borders to tens of millions of dark immigrants, or to bus your children to jungle neighborhoods, or to accept legalized pornography an the abortion murder of babies, then it is Caesar`s responsibility, not the Christian`s. So don`t concern yourselves. ~ Frazier Glenn Miller

From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from 'restrictive covenants' to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

My name recognition has opened doors on the research side. I used to go into crack houses and drug markets and really bad neighborhoods by myself, routinely, and hang out. Sometimes I still do, because I don't want to attract attention. But lately, I've been riding with cops and gaining access to other types of law, like the ATF guys, just because of my name. I guess it's a smarter way to work. ~ George Pelecanos

The best real-estate investments with the highest yields are in working-class neighborhoods, because fancy properties are overpriced. ~ Jane Bryant Quinn

I lived in New York City back in the 1980s, which is when the Bordertown series was created. New York was a different place then -- dirtier, edgier, more dangerous, but also in some ways more exciting. The downtown music scene was exploding -- punk and folk music were everywhere -- and it wasn't as expensive to live there then, so a lot of young artists, musicians, writers, etc. etc. were all living and doing crazy things in scruffy neighborhoods like the East Village.

I was a Fantasy Editor for a publishing company back then -- but in those days, "fantasy" to most people meant "imaginary world" books, like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. A number of the younger writers in the field, however, wanted to create a branch of fantasy that was rooted in contemporary, urban North America, rather than medieval or pastoral Europe. I'd already been working with some of these folks (Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, etc.), who were writing novels that would become the foundations for the current Urban Fantasy field. At the time, these kinds of stories were considered so strange and different, it was actually hard to get them into print.

When I was asked by a publishing company to create a shared-world anthology for Young Adult readers, I wanted to create an Urban Fantasy setting that was something like a magical version of New York...but I didn't want it to actually be New York. I want it to be any city and every city -- a place that anyone from anywhere could go to or rela ~ Terri Windling

If you live in poor neighborhoods - I know from living in several poor neighborhoods - the worst supermarkets in the city are in the poorest neighborhoods, where people don't have cars. ~ Sandra Cisneros

I was filming a movie in London, and I drove through Ireland. It was quite beautiful, and the countryside was really remarkable. The contrast between the countryside and Ireland, and the murals there, with Northern Ireland still being a part of the United Kingdom, there's just a stark contrast in those two things. And I found that the art that came out of the conflict was really spectacular because it was about remembering either events or points of view for local neighborhoods, or the rallying cries of one side against the other. ~ Vince Vaughn

Losing your home and possessions and often your job; being stamped with an eviction record and denied government housing assistance; relocating to degrading housing in poor and dangerous neighborhoods; and suffering from increased material hardship, homelessness, depression, and illness - this is eviction's fallout. Eviction does not simply drop poor families into a dark valley, a trying yet relatively brief detour on life's journey. It fundamentally redirects their way, casting them onto a different, and much more difficult, path. Eviction is a case, not just a condition, of poverty. ~ Matthew Desmond

I've never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood. ~ Orhan Pamuk

My father's music gives hope to people and also inspires them to break the bonds of injustice and to be positive in life. I've seen that everywhere I go, especially in poor countries and poor neighborhoods. ~ Ziggy Marley

It is a cultural tradition that makes New Orleans what it is. It also represents the roots of American music and an important part of the African-American community in New Orleans. It unites people in some of the poorer neighborhoods of the city. It is absolutely critical to continue. ~ Bill Taylor

For the Irish, life is a matter of perpetual grievance. We remember the Famine, but forget the Draft Riots. We seal off our neighborhoods to strangers, but allow our own priests to victimize our own children. We worship violence and we enslave ourselves to alcohol, we lie and steal and kill without conscience for generations at a time. But it's all right in the end, and do you know why? Because we don't tolerate lust. ~ Mary Gordon

Our cities with their swollen populations and cliff dwelling high-rise buildings are breeding places for loneliness. Neighborhoods crumble under the housing development bulldozers and families scatter in pursuit of jobs and professions everywhere. In a world of wheels, old and comfortable groupings of people have disappeared. ~ Allan Fromme

There are about 300,000 neighborhoods in the United States, and more than half of them have at least one millionaire living there. Most millionaires drive American cars. Out of the top 30 or 40 makes and models, Ford is number one, with about 10 percent of the market share. ~ Thomas J. Stanley

Just as playgrounds didn't even make the priority list of most of those responding to Katrina, they all too often slip off the radar of those building our schools, designing our neighborhoods, and drafting government budgets. ~ Darell Hammond

I don't really have one type favorite type of candy. When I was younger we used to always go to the rich neighborhoods where they give out the big candy bars, not the little fun-sized ones. We'd go back two and three times, hit them again and again. They didn't care and we loved it. ~ Tony Harrison

Finally I realized these were the nasty Christians praying for their neighborhoods, their communities, their families - the prayers of the people I hated the most. Wherever these praying Christians lived, I couldn't penetrate the neighborhood. I got in, but I couldn't do the evil acts I had come to perform. So I would move on to the next neighborhood. This was my calling, and it was also what I loved to do. ~ John Ramirez

I lived in an all-black neighborhood, followed by an all-white one, and other kids in the always called me Mexican in both neighborhoods. ~ Cheech Marin

Travel is the only context in which some people ever look around. If we spent half the energy looking at our own neighborhoods, we'd probably learn twice as much. ~ Lucy R. Lippard

It was once said that the poor are 'constantly exposed to evidence of their own irrelevance.' Especially for poor African-American families - who live in neighborhoods with rates of violence and concentrated poverty so extreme that even the worst white neighborhoods bear little resemblance - living in degrading housing in dangerous neighborhoods sent a clear message about where the wider society thought they belonged. ~ Matthew Desmond

also get why people aren't beating down the doors of the polling places. For one, we can't keep track of whether we're supposed to bring a DNA sample or a urine sample this time to prove our identity and residency. It keeps changing. For another, the hours and polling locations in poorer neighborhoods keep getting cut for some reason. It is definitely not at all a conscious effort to repress the poor (read likely Democrat) vote. At all. Ever. (Dear GOP: You guys might want to police your people. They keep openly saying that your goal is to repress the vote of the poor.) Additionally, ~ Linda Tirado

But do you think the achievements of the Americans -- envied the world over -- came without a cost? Just ask their African brothers. And do you think the engineers who designed their illustrious skyscrapers or built their highways hesitated for one moment to level the lovely little neighborhoods that stood in their way? I guarantee you, Alexander, they laid the dynamite and pushed the plungers themselves. ~ Amor Towles

The reason why rappers are living in - you know, driving in Mercedes-Benz's and living in neighborhoods is because they're selling their music, not just to the black community, but to the white community. ~ Eric Bolling

If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can't imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America's alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart - and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings. ~ Rita Dove

Another option, which I think is the thing that makes more sense, is this fact that the police are a reflection of the occupation of certain neighborhoods and certain parts of cities that are designed, basically, to keep the bottom down and basically maintain the status quo, but out of sight, so that the other side - the people in power, the people with money, the people with comfort, the people that are living in the "safer" areas - are sure that they can sleep safely in their bed while bad thing are happening to people and it's not their problem. ~ Oren Moverman

Neighborhoods that mainly operated at night had a way of looking a lot worse in the morning. ~ William Gibson

To survive, the people in neighborhoods are going to have to secede. ~ Karl Hess

If we all went to Google right now, or went to Yelp right now, we'd all get the same results, and that seems really, really broken to me. Foursquare should understand the neighborhoods I've spent a lot of time in, and the restaurants that I went to once but never went back to. ~ Dennis Crowley

The upscale neighborhoods in Blue Sky Hill weren't all lily white anymore, but you could be sure their kids didn't wear our kind of clothes, or get free lunches at the Summer Kitchen, or pick up used books and magazines down at the Book Basket store, or go to the public school. These days it wasn't about what color you were, but how much money you had. The same, only different. It was still people not wanting to be with people who weren't their kind. ~ Lisa Wingate

Let's stop wasting billions of dollars on prisons, which send people home who are too often less capable and more damaged than when they went in. We would have safer neighborhoods if we spent the same money on true rehabilitation, job training, employment and entrepreneurship. ~ Van Jones

The instability of a white neighborhood under pressure from the very possibility of integration put the neighborhood into a kind of real estate purgatory. It set off a downward cycle of anticipation, in which worried whites no longer bought homes in white neighborhoods that might one day attract colored residents even if none lived there at the time. Rents and purchase prices were dropped "in a futile attempt to attract white residents," as Hirsch put it. With prices falling and the neighborhood's future uncertain, lenders refused to grant mortgages or made them more difficult to obtain. Panicked whites sold at low prices to salvage what equity they had left, giving the homeowners who remained little incentive to invest any further to keep up or improve their properties. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

Tragedy happens - "tragic mistakes" happen - when men act according to their flawed natures, in fulfillment of their preordained destinies. The tragedy of the four killers of Amadou Diallo is that their deeds were made possible by their general preconceptions about black people and poor neighborhoods; by a theory of policing that encourages them to be rigid and punitive toward petty offenders; and by a social context in which the possession and use of firearms is so normative as to be almost beyond discussion. The tragedy of the street vendor Amadou Diallo is that he came as an innocent to the slaughter, made vulnerable by poverty and by the color of his skin. And the tragedy of America is that a nation which sees itself as leading the world toward a global future in which the American values of freedom and justice will be available for everyone fails so frequently and so badly to guarantee that freedom and that justice for so many people within its own frontiers. ~ Salman Rushdie

The American People will come first once again. My plan will begin with safety at home - which means safe neighborhoods, secure borders, and protection from terrorism. There can be no prosperity without law and order. ~ Donald Trump

You said, "I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will be found, better than this.
Every effort of mine is condemned by fate;
and my heart is-like a corpse-buried.
How long in this wasteland will my mind remain.
Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look
I see the black ruins of my life here,
where I spent so many years, and ruined and wasted."
New lands you will not find, you will not find other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
in these same houses you will grow gray.
Always you will arrive in this city. To another land-do not hope-
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have ruined your life here
in this little corner, you have destroyed it in the whole world.2 ~ Constantine P. Cavafy

These events are swirling around them. In the white community, people felt like they had no control over their neighborhoods, their destiny. In the black community, centuries of government and economic forces were pushing on them. I went in with a kind of arrogance, maybe, that came from living in a very intellectual family, and I left knowing that there was a lot about the way people lived that I didn't know about. ~ Sara Paretsky

When the real history of mankind is fully disclosed, will it feature the echoes of gunfire or the shaping sound of lullabies? The great armistices made by military men or the peacemaking of women in homes and in neighborhoods? Will what happened in cradles and kitchens prove to be more controlling than what happened in congresses? When the surf of the centuries has made the great pyramids so much sand, the everlasting family will still be standing, because it is a celestial institution, formed outside telestial time. ~ Neal A. Maxwell

I grew up in an apartment my whole life. It was just me, my mom, and my brother - she supported us. And we've always liked driving through rich neighborhoods, especially around Christmas. We would always admire the wealth. I always had this strange feeling with it. ~ George Clarke

I really love New York, and I've lived here for a long time. I know not just the different neighborhoods but the different kind of class cultures in New York from the up-and-coming, down-and-out kind of artist to the powerful worlds of finance. ~ Neil Burger

You know, because of the lack of budget, we had to find neighborhoods where time had stopped - kind of stuck in the '50s. And no place had that better than Staten Island. ~ Jason Alexander