Inner City Sayings

#1. I was lucky that science fair was mandatory at my high school in inner-city Buffalo.

Megan Smith

#2. We cannot ignore the disparity in resources that continue to plague many of our school systems, especially those serving predominantly inner-city minority and impoverished children.

Diane Watson

#3. It has come to the time where the most dangerous place to be in America is not the inner city, where gangs threaten innocent lives, or in angry prisons, where only the fit survive, but in the womb of a mother who is being told that if she doesn't really want the baby, an abortion is the solution.

Charles R. Swindoll

#4. We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.

Henry Louis Gates

#5. I grew up in the inner city of Chicago, and then I moved to Robbins, and it kind of raised me. When I was in college, I actually had them change the starting lineup to say 'from Robbins, Illinois' instead of 'Chicago, Illinois.'

Dwyane Wade

#6. 531he location of a temp agency-in inner-city immigrant neighborhoods, for example-influences not only the resulting population of temps but also the job opportunities that are available (or not) to workers54

Erin Hatton

#7. Whether it's in an inner-city school or a rural community, I want those students to have a chance to take A.P. biology and A.P. physics and marine biology.

Arne Duncan

#8. In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there's such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success.

Bill Gates

#9. You'll hear people say it's racist to test. Folks, it's racist not to test. Because guess who gets shuffled through the system oftentimes? Children whose parents don't speak English as a first language, inner-city kids. It's so much easier to quit on somebody than to remediate.

George W. Bush

#10. How do we redefine education so that 30-50 percent of inner-city children do not drop out of school, thus ensuring that millions will end up in prison?

Grace Lee Boggs

#11. As minorities and other immigrant groups become more important to our economy, the inner city is a crucible that gives us an early look at phenomena that are going to be spreading more broadly in the economy over time.

Michael Porter

#12. Hypersegregated inner-city schools - in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 - are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.

Jonathan Kozol

#13. It doesn't matter if you come from the inner city. People who fail in life are people who find lots of excuses. It's never too late for a person to recognize that they have potential in themselves.

Ben Carson

#14. What's popular in places considered ghettos - whether that's the inner city or Appalachia - is having a decent quality of life.

Majora Carter

#15. At present, black children are more segregated in their public schools than at any time since 1968. In the inner-city schools I visit, minority children typically represent 95 percent to 99 percent of class enrollment.

Jonathan Kozol

#16. The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities, dysfunctional inner city school and broken black families.

Star Parker

#17. Inner city education must change. Our responsibility is not merely to provide access to knowledge; we must produce educated people.

James L. Farmer Jr.

#18. I am particularly surprised that certain outlets look at pass rates irrespective of student population. As if inner city high school kids are to fare as well as college students.

Sebastian Thrun

#19. This is the problem with over-crowded inner-city schools there aren't enough parts for everyone in the nativity story.

Karl Pilkington

#20. No Child Left Behind widens the gap between the races more than any piece of educational legislation I've seen in 40 years. It denies inner-city kids the critical-thinking skills to interrogate reality.

Jonathan Kozol

#21. He seems like a nice charming guy. [Mike Huckabee] doesn't believe in evolution and has some nutty views about what it is we should do about ending violence in our inner city - we should make sure all of our young people are armed. Republicans scare me.

Elizabeth Edwards

#22. I was like any other inner-city kid with a chip on his shoulder because his daddy and his mommy wasn't together.

Tracy Morgan

#23. The fact is inner-city black districts are not the same as suburban Republican districts. That's a fact. And people need to go and learn about the whole country.

Newt Gingrich

#24. We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about.

Henry Louis Gates

#25. Music was in the air when I was growing up. My siblings Katy, Dave and Phil were musical; my dad worked in inner-city New York where a musical revolution was taking place - folk music, rock n' roll, gospel music. My sister taught me to sing. My brothers taught me to play.

Sam Barry

#26. The classroom as a living, breathing place. They chose discussions over lectures, experience over theory. They sent students to the Deep South for civil rights projects and to the inner city for fieldwork. They went

Mitch Albom

#27. The first time I've actually filmed in London, the locations we've all had have been real inner city, grimy urban places which has been great. Filming here, you've got everything on your doorstep, so when you've got time off, you can go into town, so I've really enjoyed it.

Jonas Armstrong

#28. The young men in the inner city are without guidance, robbing and shooting each other with no remorse ... Our system is crazy because we're planning to fail. Everybody needs something to grasp on to.

Lamar Odom

#29. If all I ever wrote about was inner city freaks, I think it would be dishonest.

Eric Bogosian

#30. I grew up in one of the most deprived parts of Britain. I know the problems which inner-city children face.

David Blunkett

#31. It doesn't matter what you're trying to accomplish. It's all a matter of discipline. I was determined to discover what life held for me beyond the inner-city streets.

Wilma Rudolph

#32. I do not believe in widening the income gap between rich and poor, and my life's work in the inner city of Detroit demonstrates that far more than any sound bite.

Clark Durant

#33. I've been in this struggle for many years now. I understand racism. I understand that there are a lot of people in this country who don't care about the problems of the inner city. We have to fight every day that we get up for every little thing that we get. And so I keep struggling.

Maxine Waters

#34. I've also been working with the Challengers Club in the inner city of Los Angeles for 15 years now, I guess, and it's essentially an inner-city recreation club for boys and girls.

Richard Dean Anderson

#35. Sports and entertainment are the only places where inner-city kids see themselves being able to succeed. Their intellectual development is something they don't relate to.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

#36. I taught for 17 years in an inner city comprehensive schools.

Estelle Morris

#37. It's not always easy growing up in an inner-city area, but in my music I want to show people that you can turn it into something positive.

Tinchy Stryder

#38. I'm LeBron James, from Akron, Ohio, from the inner city. I'm not even supposed to be here. That's enough. Every night I walk into the locker room, I see a No. 6 with James on the back, I'm blessed. So what everybody says about me off the court, don't matter. I ain't got no worries.

LeBron James

#39. If it's wrong for 13-year-old inner-city girls to have babies without the benefit of marriage, it's wrong for rich celebrities, and we ought to stop putting them on the cover of People magazine.

Marian Wright Edelman

#40. Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until graduate school.

Alison Gopnik

#41. Black employers are just as negative as the white employers concerning inner-city workers.

William Julius Wilson

#42. Crack offered a lot of money to the inner-city youth who didn't go to college. Which enabled them to become businessmen. I know about maybe five people in the entertainment industry who did their peak work as a result of crack usage.

Questlove

#43. Reagan's neglect of the inner city is responsible for hiphop. Hiphop is created thanks to the conditions that crack set: easy money but a lot of work, the violence involved, the stories it produced. Crack helped birth hiphop.

Questlove

#44. In the end, we may be hurting the very people we should be concerned about - the inner-city poor, those who already have to live with many risks in their daily lives, those who do not have clout here in Washington.

Fred Thompson

#45. One challenge is trying to extend access to more poorly served communities in rural areas and in the inner city. Sometimes you have kids who are suffering from trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, and they have no way of getting access to the remedies that are available to them.

Scott Stossel

#46. If you look at the data, the inner city that was the riot zone lost 55,000 jobs in the ten years from 1992 to 2002, instead of gaining a surplus of 50,000.

Tom Hayden

#47. Integrating the beauty of seasonal change into the residence was a concept that remains true even today even in the more cramped, inner city machiya.

Judith Clancy

#48. The reason most of the children are having problems in any inner-city neighborhood is because they don't see enough positive role models in their own environment.

Marla Gibbs

#49. As a good player in the inner city, you're always hearing people saying that you're better than you really are and that you don't have to do things like everybody else.

Carmelo Anthony

#50. I started out as a high school teacher in inner-city Chicago and realized quite quickly that my students weren't that motivated.

Jack Canfield

#51. We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health. And in the inner city, people don't have grocery stores. They have to get on a bus and take a long ride to get to a source of fresh produce.

Michael Pollan

#52. I was one of those kids, inner-city youth and finding my way. I made it. I made a success out of myself, surprisingly.

CeeLo Green

#53. I need to conduct myself differently in different communities. In my experience, the journalistic conventions - you know, I'm the reporter, you're the subject, the interviewee - actually tend to hold steady much more consistently in rural Africa than they do in the American inner city.

William Finnegan

#54. Now that Obama's president, it changes inner-city youths. They can now not just dream to be Lil Waynes and 50 Cents, but they can now dream to be Obamas.

Will.i.am

#55. Hip-hop - it's the safari: it allows people who aren't under those circumstances to come closer to inner-city life, to explore it without actually being in danger. It's something kids in middle America indulge in to be rebellious.

Curtis Jackson

#56. You might hear people decry the loss of privacy in today's world, but radical transparency is dramatically reducing violence everywhere. Most violent things happen in the dark when no one's watching, whether it's an oppressive dictator or someone causing violence in the inner city.

Peter Diamandis

#57. 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

#58. Teaching high school in an inner-city school is not an easy task. Every teacher is responsible for 150 teenagers. The amount of work is just mind-boggling. Remember, you're not just doing a job. You have these kids' futures in your hand; you have to inspire them.

Tony Danza

#59. The stark truth is that as long as the welfare state makes it possible for young women - or teenage girls - to have children without a husband and survive without a job, out-of-wedlock births will remain ruinously high, and the inner city will continue to be marked by crime, poverty, and despair.

David Boaz

#60. Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons.

Michelle Alexander

#61. I love the fact that a lot of my audience is people from the inner city. African-Americans love my films.

Wes Craven

#62. East St. Louis-which the local press refers to as "an inner city without an outer city"-has some of the sickest children in America. Of 66 cities in Illinois, East St. Louis ranks first in fetal death, first in premature birth, and third in infant health.

Jonathan Kozol

#63. In the inner city, there's a mentality that the government owes you something. My breakthrough came when I stopped feeling sorry for myself and took responsibility for every part of my life. No more pity parties. I've gotta love me more than anybody else loves me.

Mary J. Blige

#64. Reclusive? The inner city will secure your privacy better than any desert cave.

Mason Cooley

#65. We are good citizens, and we cannot protect ourselves because you allow the criminals to run wild ... I'd like you to come and live in the inner city for a week and see the importance of having a weapon ... Go after the criminals and not the good people.

Jesse Lee Peterson

#66. My younger sister retired a few years ago after a 30-year career teaching history and social studies at an inner-city high school.

Judy Woodruff

#67. People know Tyler Perry, and there are standards they've come to expect from him. His brand is uplifting, and it's something a lot of inner-city African-Americans can relate to.

Michael Jai White

#68. I grew in the inner city, listening to Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, James Brown, The Commodores - lots of soul music.

Stefon Harris

#69. You know where entrepreneurship in my opinion has to go? Into the inner city.

John Kasich

#70. Be it in the rough-and-tumble world of inner-city politics or the bare-knuckle boxing ring, the Irish rightly earned their fightin' moniker.

Rashers Tierney

#71. He followed, stamping angrily through the disused lots and inner-city disaster areas of his subconscious.

Terry Pratchett

#72. I grew up in an inner city neighborhood called the Benson Hurst section of Brooklyn, which was a very embracing, warm, family-type neighborhood.

Anthony Fauci

#73. My research clearly reveals that if we want to put inner-city workers to work immediately, we just can't rely on the private sector. They don't want to touch them; they don't want to hire them.

William Julius Wilson

#74. Until we're educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

Bill Gates

#75. Growing up in inner-city Glasgow, it sometimes seemed to me money hadn't been invented.

Jack Bruce

#76. I went to an inner-city school in Buffalo. We had no money. But our teachers believed in hands-on active learning - there was a mandatory science fair, which was critical.

Megan Smith

#77. In 1968, America was a wounded nation. The wounds were moral ones; the Vietnam War and three summers of inner-city riots had inflicted them on the national soul, challenging Americans' belief that they were a uniquely noble and honorable people.

Thurston Clarke

#78. I graduated from Bowdoin College and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Then I left and took a job teaching really poor inner-city white kids in Boston. It was interesting to me because I'd never been around poor whites before.

Geoffrey Canada

#79. Richard Pryor introduced me to the world of the inner city, and the urban world, and did it hysterically. My favorite comedian, even though we work 180 degrees differently, but funny is funny is funny.

Bob Newhart

#80. My London constituency in Hackney has one of the highest levels of gun crime in the country. But the problem is no longer confined to inner city areas. Gun crime has spread to communities all over Britain.

Diane Abbott

#81. I told my parents she's a low-income student from inner-city Philadelphia who's going through some tough times at home right now, and I'm doing this as an outreach program through Rosewood Day. Amazingly, they bought it.

Sara Shepard

#82. It's true that I had a bucolic, truly peaceful childhood, growing up in a house next to our family's orchard. We had a lot of books and art, but no electricity until I was eight years old. Since then, I have seen a lot of inner-city life, though.

Virginia Euwer Wolff

#83. I mean, when you grow up in the inner city and you grow up in a single-parent household, that's - those are humbling times, you know?

LeBron James

#84. A person like myself, born and raised in the inner city of Atlanta, Georgia, to lower-middle-class parents. But I had the opportunity to get an education, to go and earn a commission in the United States Army, to serve for 22 years, to lead men and women in combat.

Allen West

#85. Most people assume the War on Drugs was launched in response to the crisis caused by crack cocaine in inner-city neighborhoods.

Michelle Alexander

#86. Anand finished up his cola cube transaction. I stepped up and slammed three pound coins on the counter like an oppressed inner-city youth born with the skills of rhythm and rhyme.

Nikesh Shukla

#87. In my experience I haven't met too many uptight black people. I'm sure they're out there. Like I'm some big authority and I've lived in the inner city and ghetto.

Paul Reubens

#88. Except for its worst inner-city slums, America is not the primitive capitalist jungle of European imagination, where human beings slink away like wounded animals to die in bloodstained holes.

Timothy Garton Ash

#89. How you mean, 'doughnut hole'?" Ti-Jeanne had asked. "That's what they call it when an inner city collapses and people run to the suburbs," he'd answered.

Nalo Hopkinson

#90. Books, I knew then and now, give body to our ideas and imaginations, make them flesh in the world; a bookstore is the city where our fleshed-out inner selves reside.

Lewis Buzbee

#91. Those who keep the peace of their inner selves in the midst of the tumult of the modern city are immune from nervous diseases.

Dale Carnegie

#92. Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one's own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it?

Olivia Sudjic

#93. When you go to Detroit you see a town that is resilient, that's just fighting to win again, and there's an energy to that. Just watching a city really fighting to get back on its feet and watching the inner strength of a city is tremendous.

George Clooney

#94. If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.

Matthew Desmond

#95. Standing on soil feels so much different than standing on city pavement; it lets you look inward and reflect and see who you really are, while you see a beautiful, unspoiled land as far as the eye can see. It allows your inner life to grow.

Ricardo Montalban

#96. A young, beautiful mayor's with high-powered plans for the city of Compton must put them aside to become a sleuth to solve the assassination of her husband, the mayor.

Martha Tucker

#97. Till your inner garden and your outer landscape will flourish

Gina Greenlee

#98. No man will survive who genuinely opposes you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time

Plato

#99. I hear nothing. I hear nothing, but what does it mean that I hear nothing? I walk in the cemeteries of this city at night and I hear nothing. I walk among mortals and sometimes I hear nothing. I walk alone and I hear nothing, as if I myself had no inner voice.

Anne Rice

#100. I believe the challenge the city faces is attracting continued development into the inner and western part of Jersey City. Nobody should be left behind as Jersey City continues to prosper and grow.

Vincent Frank