Top 100 Birmingham's Quotes
#1. When I go and speak now at all sorts of conferences, later in the night there's always a better Maxie Walker than me. Billy Birmingham's legendary for basically being able to verbally kneecap any of a number of Australia's characters, particularly in the commentary box.
Max Walker
#2. Used to Sears, JC Penney, and Woolworth's, Birmingham's stores sounded foreign: Gucci, Jacobson's, and Dittrich Furs. Underground parking kept the shoppers flawlessly coifed and dry - a scene from a Hollywood movie.
Claudia Whitsitt
#3. African Americans had been compelled to work in Alabama mines prior to the Great Depression. His grandfather, once a coal miner himself, had told him stories of a similar burial field near the family home place south of Birmingham.
Douglas A. Blackmon
#4. True connection with the world and others, can only come about when one has begun to connect with themselves.
Catherine Louise Birmingham
#5. It's nice to watch television but it's even nicer when you've got a drink in your hand,' Gregory Ratcliffe, a Birmingham shopkeeper, told Reynolds News. 'Makes it more intimate somehow. Gives you the feeling that you're in a posh cabaret.
David Kynaston
#6. People forget that many of the aspects of the Selma campaign were laid out in response to the church bombing in Birmingham.
Andrew Aydin
#7. In Birmingham, Manchester or Liverpool there are white gangs that share the same backgrounds - they come from broken homes, completely dysfunctional, mums for the most part unable to cope, the fathers of these kids completely not in the scene.
Iain Duncan Smith
#8. She's remarkably refined." "You told me she slung Miss Birmingham over her shoulder and tossed her into a carriage.
Jen Turano
#9. Cycling to work is an important issue for business - the more who do it, the more our communities will support it. Healthy and green, cycling is worthy of the support of every business in the land.
Digby Jones, Baron Jones Of Birmingham
#11. I was watching the Blackburn game on TV on Sunday when it flashed on the screen that George (Ndah) had scored in the first minute at Birmingham. My first reaction was to ring him up. Then I remembered he was out there playing.
Ade Akinbiyi
#13. In Birmingham, the women are maintained, the men are greedily lustful, and the children are named after high-end automobiles. You are just as likely to run into a Bentley, Mercedes, Porsche, and Lexus walking on the sidewalk as you are cruising the downtown streets.
Victoria Laurie
#14. Well I've seen travel in many waysI've traveled in cars and old subwaysBut in Birmingham some people choseTo fly down the street from a fire hose.Doin' some hard travelin' ... from hydrants of plenty.
Phil Ochs
#15. I'm in the process of brainstorming with my marketing team and all that stuff, trying to come up with a concept for a late-night restaurant for people in Birmingham.
Ruben Studdard
#16. If you want to feel and know everything the horse is doing, begin by feeling and knowing everything you are doing.
Catherine Louise Birmingham
#18. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#19. I did a drama degree, went to secretarial college, then got a job with a theatre company in Birmingham. It's been a slow burn, which doesn't seem to have gone out.
Tamsin Greig
#21. I write late into the night at the Tutweiler in downtown Birmingham, and try hard to turn down that second cheeseburger at Milo's over by UAB, which has the best one in the whole wide world.
Rick Bragg
#22. Push to achieve your dreams. Don't let anyone push you out of dreamland.
Christy Birmingham
#23. As far as I'm concerned, that is the end of the matter. We have a big game against Birmingham on Saturday and that is where our focus lies.
Bryan Robson
#27. My family is from Liverpool, so I have some of those vowel sounds, I've got the slack tone of someone from Birmingham, and then I was raised in Bedford, which is just north of London. So my accent, if it's possible, makes even less sense to a Brit than to an American.
John Oliver
#28. It was illegal for black people and white people to play checkers together in Birmingham. And there were even black and white Bibles to swear to tell the truth on in many parts of the South.
Isabel Wilkerson
#29. Every single player on the pitch is now in the Birmingham box, apart from two of them.
Paul Merson
#30. It's not like, I don't know, if Madonna has a new record out, then everybody from Bangkok to Birmingham knows what its called and can buy it the same week. But our stuff is not in that mass market.
Evan Parker
#31. The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#32. If you live in Birmingham, then being awake is not necessarily a desirable state.
Tony Wilson
#33. I will work out exactly how - with my no money, no money at all, until I actually receive my first, dawdling pay-cheque - I will get to Birmingham later. Perhaps Birmingham will, in the next week, move closer to Wolverhampton, and I can simply walk there!
Caitlin Moran
#34. Even if our motives are presently misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#35. As a young singer, you have to get experience somehow, to try things out and grow as a singer. They way you do that is by going through the ranks and singing at companies like Opera Birmingham. It's a perfect place to foster a career.
Susanna Phillips
#37. Nobody wants a house in Osaka,' he said, and it was strange to hear him switch suddenly to foreign pronunciation in the middle of his English. 'It would mean you had to live in Osaka.'
'What's wrong with it?'
'It's like . . . Birmingham.
Natasha Pulley
#38. 300 million people turned into jelly by The Wave and Rupert Murdoch wasn't one of them. There is no god.
John Birmingham
#39. This kind of music was just hitting England, so we were getting this following in clubs in Birmingham just cause we were trying to do something different.
Jim Capaldi
#40. I first played the Royal Albert Hall when I was 14. I was a violinist with the Birmingham Schools Concert Orchestra, and we travelled down from the Midlands for the last night of the School Proms. We played some pieces from the Harry Potter films, and the violin parts were really hard.
Laura Mvula
#42. I played with the Birmingham Black Barons. I was making 500 at 14. That was a lot of money in those days.
Willie Mays
#44. A great many people go after success simply for the shiny prizes it brings ... And nowhere is it pursued more ardently than in the city of New York.
Stephen Birmingham
#45. We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighers did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#47. Every year I teach dozens of students at the University of Birmingham. Most of the students on the gender and sexuality courses are women. I guess this is because the boys don't think that gender applies to them: that it's a subject for girls.
Louise Brown
#48. The love of money is the root of all evil, therefore selfishness must be the seed.
M.D. Birmingham
#49. I believe we as humans are meant to have a bond and a connection with all of life itself, and our animals are trying to open our hearts to it.
Catherine Louise Birmingham
#50. I remember what a thrill it was to go from the back streets of Birmingham to Madison Square Garden in New York ... it's like playing on Mars. You can't buy that.
Ozzy Osbourne
#52. When I was in Birmingham I used to go to a place called Redwood Field. I used to get there for a two o'clock game. Where can you make this kind of money playing sports? It was just a pleasure to go out and enjoy myself and get paid for it.
Willie Mays
#53. Working in Birmingham for the first time was the best thing, especially as it was round the corner from my mum's house in Harborne!
Kate Ashfield
#54. Last time I was on the welcome Wagon, I was holding some guy by the balls for 15 minutes while the inspector explained why should leave (Birmingham) and go home... It were really painful.
I bet it was.
'Yeah I got terrible cramp in me fingers, but he were very attentive.
Jim McGrath
#55. He felt as if he'd woken up, weak and confused, only to be told that he'd spent the last three weeks in bed with a fever
and that during his illness, Queen Victoria had abdicated the throne and run off with a lion-tamer from Birmingham. The world seemed an entirely different place.
Courtney Milan
#56. Unfortunately for the Culver Creek Nothings, we weren't playing the deaf-and-blind school. We were playing some Christian school from downtown Birmingham, a team stocked with huge, gargantuan apemen with thick beards and a strong distaste for turning the other cheek.
John Green
#57. The problems of the world are not going to be engaged with and solved in Faversham, they're going to be sorted out in cities like Birmingham.
Jim Crace
#58. The saddest face I ever saw on Martin Luther King was at the funeral of the four little girls slain in Birmingham, Alabama.
James A. Forbes
#59. I grew up in Birmingham, where they made useful things and made them well.
Lee Child
#60. One of my colleagues in Birmingham University, where I come from,' said Trevair, 'is a moral philosopher. He taught me that one of the ways to judge a course of action is to consider what company it puts one in. I doubt if that's very good philosophy, but I find it a good rule of thumb.
Jill Paton Walsh
#61. At ten I was playing against 18-year-old guys. At 15 I was playing professional ball with the Birmingham Black Barons, so I really came very quickly in all sports.
Willie Mays
#62. All I've got on my iPod is every single Queen song and every single Judas Priest song. Queen were an incredible heavy metal band. I saw them on their first ever tour, at Birmingham Town Hall. They just blew me away.
Rob Halford
#64. Birmingham was a dirty industrial city, and from the plane it had a delicate rose-pink aura of pollution, like the chiffon scarf around the neck of an old prostitute.
Ken Follett
#66. I was born in segregated Birmingham, Alabama. I didn't have a white classmate till we moved to Denver.
Condoleezza Rice
#67. While growing up in Birmingham around a lot of West Indian people, reggae and calypso were big influences early on but Otis Redding was the one person who made me wanna sing myself.
Roland Gift
#68. Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.
Winston Churchill
#69. Birmingham City Council was playing third time lucky with the design of the city's celebrated Victoria Square ...
Tom Holt
#70. And Paris, when you avoid the more conspicuous resorts, and when you are unprovided with congenial companionship can prove nearly as overwhelming as is, say, Birmingham on a Sunday.
Ford Madox Ford
#71. Obviously it's very hard to leave a club that you've supported all your life. But the reason that I've come to Birmingham is that I think Steve Bruce is one of the best young managers in the country and that Birmingham as a club is a sleeping giant
David Dunn
#72. I admire Tom Ades: he's a brilliant conductor, and he gets just the right hard, brilliant sound from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Russian music.
Charles Hazlewood
#73. This time at Birmingham turned me into a general biologist, and ever since then I have always tried to take a biological approach to any research project that I have undertaken.
Paul Nurse
#74. After an extensive interview he arranged for my weaknesses in foreign languages to be over-looked and so I started a Biology degree at Birmingham in 1967.
Paul Nurse
#75. I love Birmingham, Michigan. It's lovely - you know, it's very similar to the Hamptons.
Elaine Stritch
#76. One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.
Jane Austen
#77. I grew up in Birmingham, but my parents are originally from Barbados. My dad, Romeo, was a long-distance lorry driver, and my mother, Mayleen, worked in catering.
David Harewood
#78. Nobody black had learned anything from the 'Letter from the Birmingham Jail' or from the 'I Have a Dream' speech. That was a revelation of white people.
Andrew Young
#79. Companies that understand their links with the communities they operate in, and their impact on the environment, are most likely to prosper in the long-term
Digby Jones, Baron Jones Of Birmingham
#81. I started in the kitchen of a Holiday Inn in Birmingham. I wanted to be a sponge, wanted to learn and progress. I knew I didn't want to work in a hotel forever, but I had some good teachers there.
April Bloomfield
#82. You do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs, nor to the insidious activity of the streets.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#84. I lived in the Quarter for two years, but in the end I got tired of Birmingham businessmen smirking around Bourbon Street and the homosexuals and patio connoisseurs on Royal Street.
Walker Percy
#87. I would not hesitate to say that it is unfortunate that so-called demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham at this time, but I would say in more emphatic terms that it is even more unfortunate that the white power structure of this city left the Negro community with no other alternative.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#88. I don't know if that result's enough to life Birmingham off the bottom of the table, although it'll certainly take them above Sunderland
Mike Ingham
#89. The most I have to fear while hiking in Warwickshire and Worcestershire, the two historic British counties closest to my city home in Birmingham, is whether or not the mud awaiting me in the narrow lanes ahead is deep enough to foul my socks.
Jim Crace
#90. What is known as success assumes nearly as many aliases as there are those who seek it.
Stephen Birmingham
#91. I'm a city boy. I grew up in a big city, in Birmingham, and I want to write about a city. It's much richer tapestry for me than green fields. Fields and wild life make me feel ill. I don't like - I don't want to write about that stuff.
Mark Billingham
#92. We lived in a suburb of Birmingham where I attended the local state school from the age of five. I then went on to King Edward VI High School in Edgbaston, Birmingham.
John Vane
#94. The argument that the countries use for the sheer increase in Muslim doctors is the sheer increase in the Muslim population. In for example Birmingham, England where a lot of these guys came from, where one of these plots was hatched, it's up to 30% of the population. Maybe that's the problem?
Neil Cavuto
#95. Words matter, and the right words matter most of all. In the end they're all that remain of us.
John Birmingham
#96. Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.
Neil Gaiman
#97. My mother was a leading lady in a local theatre in Birmingham, Alabama, where I grew up.
Mary Badham
#98. You're doing great,' she said. 'You're in Birmingham .' Scullion wanted to say this was a contradiction in terms but he couldn't speak.
Andrew O'Hagan
#99. They had been products of their time, and walking in Birmingham now, Marcus was an accumulation of these times. That was the point.
Yaa Gyasi
#100. We shouldn't have all these campaigns to get the Birmingham Six released if they'd been hanged. They'd have been forgotten and the whole community would be satisfied.
Alfred Denning, Baron Denning
