Quotes About Detroit

#1. I grew up in Detroit. I was a teen father. I lived on welfare for three years. I have a brother serving life in prison, though I believe he's innocent.

Michael Eric Dyson

#2. There was a precarious balance during those crucial months between composition and decomposition - what the world gained and what a great city lost. Even then, some part of Detroit was dying, and that is where the story begins.

David Maraniss

#3. Detroit, the heart of the country ... I grew up on 10 Mile, 2 miles better than 8 Mile.

Kristen Bell

#4. The industrial part of Detroit is really the most interesting side, otherwise it's like the rest of the United States, ugly and stupid.

Frida Kahlo

#5. If a foreign country doesn't look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as well as badly dressed.

Lewis H. Lapham

#6. I was born in Missouri, but I was raised in Detroit. One of my stock and trades is accents.

Denis O'Hare

#7. We are essence of love, and when we die that love returns to our Father. This angel's love was corrupted, so I believe my Father sent his essence elsewhere. Possible Detroit, but that my have just been a joke.

John Wiltshire

#8. I grew up a Detroit Tigers fan, and now to be an owner of the Dodgers is amazing.

Magic Johnson

#9. I love Michigan, to be honest. I don't think I'd live nowhere else. It's cheap! This is Detroit. A little bit of nothing gets you a lot of something.

Danny Brown

#10. Go where you're celebrated, not tolerated. I'm celebrated in Detroit.

Kid Rock

#11. High school football in Detroit was not easy at all. There were talented players everywhere.

Antonio Gates

#12. I think electric cars can help save Detroit. They reflect good decision-making, and there has been bad decision making in the auto industry for so long, in my view.

Chris Paine

#13. Detroit's so bad this year they might lose their bye week.

Dennis Miller

#14. I couldn't get to sleep until four in the morning. Nobody knew. You pick up the morning paper in Chicago, and it says, 'N.Y. at Detroit (n.).' I mean, doesn't a man have a Constitutional right to the box scores?

Roger Angell

#15. Things were a lot simpler in Detroit. I didn't care about anything but boyfriends.

Madonna Ciccone

#16. Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.

Joyce Carol Oates

#17. In the days when regional music was very clearly defined and had a clear personality - Memphis, Detroit, Chicago, whatever - Philadelphia had a tradition that was very distinct and unique.

John Oates

#18. I grew up in Ann Arbor, about 25 miles west of Detroit. And when you grow up in that area, you get a healthy dose of Motown automatically.

Mayer Hawthorne

#19. Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#20. Detroit is a city that really stands out. It's been through a very difficult time. There's been a lot of pain here, and the city, physically, has suffered. You can see it in certain neighborhoods, and there's buildings downtown that have been abandoned.

Michael Imperioli

#21. I grew up in Lake Orion, Mich. What was best about Lake Orion where, where we grew up was it was a suburb of Detroit but had a lot of open space around.

Andrew J. Feustel

#22. The music is just like Detroit, a complete mistake. It's like George Clinton and Kraftwerk are stuck in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company.

Derrick May

#23. One of the best things I found out about Detroit is that bears have started returning to the city. When bears are gentrifying your neighborhood and opening Thai restaurants, that's a poor neighborhood.

Eugene Mirman

#24. Say what you want about Hitler, but he trained killers. You train kids in their early years and you can do anything you want with that child. - Sparky Anderson, manager of the Detroit Tigers, trying to explain why he prefers younger ballplayers

David James Duncan

#25. Everything I've done in my career has started in and around Detroit, you know, the metro area and Michigan.

Kid Rock

#26. And it is awful here, there is no other way to say it. But I believe that Detroit is America's city. It was the vanguard of our way up, just as it is the vanguard of our way down. And one hopes the vanguard of our way up again. Detroit is Pax Americana ... America's way of life was built here.

Charlie LeDuff

#27. The only difference between Detroit and the Third World in terms of corruption is Detroit don't have no goats in the streets.

Charlie LeDuff

#28. I'm a Detroit kid who grew up with that assembly line mentality: You go to work to make money.

Kevin Nash

#29. Many of us prefer to live in places abandoned by humans. Less work for us. Detroit is very popular.

G. Willow Wilson

#30. That's what I mean. I thought it was only in filthy places no one wants to go, like Chernobyl and Detroit.

Joe Hill

#31. I remember back in Detroit, I used to go to the Apex Bar every night after I got off work. The bartender there used to call me Boom Boom. I don't know why, but he did.

John Lee Hooker

#32. There's nowhere like Detroit; it's a modern necropolis: all these art deco masterpieces crumbling away.

Malik Bendjelloul

#33. You know, I'm the 1st black solo MC from Detroit. I didn't do the 50 Cent sales but hey ... I got a long career, I'm still young and I'm trying to bring really good music.

Obie Trice

#34. When I came to Detroit, if you threw a stone up in the air and it came down, it would hit an autoworker because the Chrysler Jefferson plant where my husband worked was very close also to where we lived.

Grace Lee Boggs

#35. And that John F. Kennedy uttered the first variation of "ask not what your country can do for you" in Detroit on Labor Day in 1960. So Detroit was really central to Democratic politics United States. Every Democratic candidate would start their fall campaigns in Cadillac Square.

David Maraniss

#36. A sit-down strike is just one step short of saying, "Look, instead of sitting down, we'll run this place. We don't need owners and managers." That's huge. That could be done in Detroit and in other places that are being closed down.

Noam Chomsky

#37. Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.

Jane Jacobs

#38. I love sports. Whenever I can, I always watch the Detroit Tigers on the radio.

Gerald R. Ford

#39. [S]tart at the turn of the last century, in 1901, with the celebration of Detroit's bicentennial. That was the Detroit that came before--before all the racket that attended the making of the modern world, which happened here first and faster than anywhere else on this planet.

Jerry Herron

#40. When I came in, the city was on the edge of bankruptcy. I'm proud of what I did. I built the foundation that mayors after me built upon - particularly Bloomberg. But the foundation was essential because if it hadn't occurred, we would have been another Detroit.

Ed Koch

#41. Detroit is really the most perfectly laid out city one could imagine, and such an enchanting park and lake, - infinitely better than any town I know in Europe. It ought to be a paradise in about fifty years when it has all matured.

Elinor Glyn

#42. I was working with C. L. R. James; I believed in Marxist ideas about the labor and movement and the workers being the secret to the future. And I learned differently just by being in Detroit and being married to Jimmy Boggs.

Grace Lee Boggs

#43. Detroit's a great music town. If your interaction with it was mainly musical, I'm sure you have a good opinion of the place.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#44. My brother and late sister and I were raised in Detroit; it was where the middle class across racial lines, the middle class was able to develop, build a home, have for the first time retirement benefits, have a job, and yes, their kids began to go to college.

Sander Levin

#45. The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.

Ernest Gellner

#46. It is a tough city to live in (Detroit) but a great city to be around. There is so much promise. There just needs to be a movement to help push the city beyond the automobile industry. The music business needs to learn how to support itself.

MC Serch

#47. Look what venison does to a goofy guitar player from Detroit? I'm going to be 54 this year and if I had any more energy I'd scare you.

Ted Nugent

#48. My music is the essence of Detroit. At one time, we were the center of the world, man - Motor City.

Big Sean

#49. People know Detroit for the cars, but the suburban areas of the city are really beautiful. It's much more inhabitable than people think. Many believe it's like Berlin at the end of World War II.

Leonard Slatkin

#50. Some black people want to get in touch with their African roots. But then you got some black people that just don't give a damn. You tell them, 'Hey, I just got back from the motherland.' They're like, 'Where'd you go - Detroit? Did you see The Temptations?'

Wanda Sykes

#51. I know that's blasphemous when you are from Detroit, but I was never a fan of Motown stuff. I don't care for the production much.

Jack White

#52. I just wasn't raised a granola eating, peace love hippie type person. I'm from Michigan and was raised in and around Detroit where it is kind of you get respect and you give respect. That is how I feel.

Kid Rock

#53. I grew up in Detroit. I grew up in an environment where you were supposed to be Democrat, where they told you that Republicans were evil people and that they were racist.

Benjamin Carson

#54. 'Detroit 1-8-7' - the numbers are police slang for murder - is filmed in that blue-collar Michigan city, providing a flavor of authenticity. Detroit offers a unique visual landscape that tells the story of the city and what it's been through.

Michael Imperioli

#55. I come from Detroit where it's rough and I'm not a smooth talker.

Eminem

#56. Nobody moves on purpose to Detroit.

Manoj Bhargava

#57. 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

#58. In Detroit, the quarterbacks lift with all the linebackers and running backs and everybody else, so I'm doing that whole thing.

Matthew Stafford

#59. Official boundaries are often hard to see. If you head north on Woodward Avenue, away from downtown Detroit, you wouldn't know exactly when you left the city and crossed over into Oakland County - except for a small sign that tells you.

Robert Reich

#60. I was just about 6 weeks old when we moved to Detroit.

Eddie Floyd

#61. I think when you saw this year's playoffs, Miami and Detroit have a pretty fierce rivalry now. Also, the Suns and San Antonio look like they're starting to develop something there. I look forward to seeing those rivalries continue and develop.

John Starks

#62. Detroit is a great deli city. If only GM could learn from what the delis in Detroit are doing! The best rye bread anywhere - double-baked, crispy, warm rye that they serve their sandwiches with - and great corned beef. It's a passionate deli town.

David Sax

#63. In March, 1902, I resigned, determined never again to put myself under orders. The Detroit Automobile Company later became the Cadillac Company under the ownership of the Lelands, who

Henry Ford

#64. Yeah I grew up on the Westside of Detroit.

Obie Trice

#65. Disruption is continuously afoot in every industry, but especially in autos. It is how Toyota, Nissan and Honda bloodied Detroit: They did not start their attack with Lexus, Infiniti and Acura, but with low-end subcompact models branded Corona, Datsun and CVCC.

Clayton Christensen

#66. No. I know that's blasphemous when you are from Detroit.

Jack White

#67. I'm a Detroit player, they set styles.

Big Sean

#68. It seemed that I could tell the whole story pretty powerfully in those 18 months between October of '62 and the spring of '64 when they were all at their peak. And yet you could see some of the shadows of Detroit's demise coming.

David Maraniss

#69. Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.

Jim Harrison

#70. Our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of taxpayers' money into the mail-order catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay.

Thomas Friedman

#71. Real cars were made here in America: Fords, Chevys, Plymouths. These were large chunks of Detroit iron - cars that had the size, weight, and handling characteristics of aircraft carriers but worse fuel efficiency.

Dave Barry

#72. 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

#73. Let Detroit go bankrupt.

Mitt Romney

#74. You see some of the weirdest people in Detroit casinos.

Kevin Hart

#75. My mum's American. She's from Detroit.

Rebecca Hall

#76. The real story of Detroit [ ... ] can be summed up in seven words. Private enterprise built it, government destroyed it.

Peter Schiff

#77. Michigan is very racially separated and the city of Detroit itself is 84 percent African-American and the surrounding suburbs are 86 percent White.

Kwame Kilpatrick

#78. I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.

Michael Eric Dyson

#79. In Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising.
The Second American Revolution.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#80. I wish we could have acted quicker on Detroit or other failing schools.

John Engler

#81. I had sort of exhausted all the avenues playing in Detroit. So again, through the stewardship of my brother, I ended up in California and went to the Musicians Institute in L.A. I wanted to get better as a player.

Chad Smith

#82. In Detroit, in a city that in many cases the world has rejected, that's where God shows up. Every example in the Gospels where God shows up, it's always when the seas are the stormiest, where there is discontinuity.

Clark Durant

#83. I'm not super thin, but I'm thin, for like, Detroit

Lena Dunham

#84. I was raised in Chicago and I guess that was one of the special breeding grounds for gangsters of all colors. That was the Detroit of the gangster world. The car industry was thugs.

Quincy Jones

#85. I was in Vancouver, and I was in what I was told was the poorest neighborhood in North America - which I find very hard to believe because has anyone here ever been to Detroit?

Eugene Mirman

#86. I had pro offers from the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers, who were pretty hard up for linemen in those days. If I had gone into professional football the name Jerry Ford might have been a household word today.

Gerald R. Ford

#87. My favorites are Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, but those are a little off in terms of getting Detroit right on the head. But of course, you know, "Dancing In The Streets." You can't forget the Motor City. And we can't forget the Motor City.

David Maraniss

#88. In Detroit, it was an average night to go and hear the Stooges, Parliament-Funkadelic and the MC5 on the same show. We were all into the 'Free Jazz' movement, the musics of Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra; and experimenting with guitar sounds, and trying different beats, and pushing the rhythm farther...

Wayne Kramer

#89. Nowhere on earth has more soul than Detroit.

Mayer Hawthorne

#90. Each poet probably has his or her own cupboard of magnets. For some, it is cars; for others, works of art, or certain patterns of form or sound; for others, certain stories or places, Philip Levine's Detroit, Gwendolyn Brooks's Chicago, Seamus Heaney's time-tunneled, familied Ireland.

Jane Hirshfield

#91. LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right.

Mark Steyn

#92. Detroit is beautiful - though you probably have to be a child of the industrial Midwest, like me, to see it.

P. J. O'Rourke

#93. When I came to Detroit I was just a mild-mannered Sunday-school boy.

Ty Cobb

#94. I think all males from Detroit have an obsession with cars.

Dax Shepard

#95. New Orleans is just a microcosm of Newark and Detroit and hundreds of other troubled urban locales.

Douglas Brinkley

#96. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

Mitt Romney

#97. A series of rumors about my attitude, as well as derogatory remarks about myself and my family showed me that the personal resentment of the Detroit general manager toward me would make it impossible for me to continue playing hockey in Detroit.

Ted Lindsay

#98. Outside of my parents, it's my older sister, Ngum. She lives with me in Detroit and helps me with my day-to-day stuff. She's somebody I've always looked up to. When she was leaving high school and going to college, I wanted to follow in her footsteps.

Ndamukong Suh

#99. I grew up in Detroit. So my mother always loved big band music.

Glenn Frey

#100. Growing up, I always thought of Detroit as a basketball town because of the Pistons, but everyone says it's really, at its core, a football town.

Ndamukong Suh