Quotes About Detroit

#1. In Detroit, Ned [Harkness] kept talking about a new concept, and when I'd ask him what he meant he never gave me the right answer. Now, take Bobby Hull. Give him a puck, a stick and a pair of skates and put him on your team. Do you need a new concept?

Frank Mahovlich

#2. Growing up as a kid in Detroit, way back, there was a movie station that would show old kinescope reproductions of old movies, and I remember seeing Bela Lugosi for the first time and being duly frightened out of my wits.

Edward Herrmann

#3. Augie: Does everybody else know?
T.C.: About my epitaph?
Augie: About me being gay, you gink-head hoser-face!
T.C. Not everybody. There's a night watchman at a Dunkin Donuts just outside of Detroit. He doesn't know yet.

Steve Kluger

#4. If you want to be in the automotive business, you go to Detroit, and you figure it out. If you want to be in entertainment, go to where it's at. Go to Hollywood, go to New York.

Nick Cannon

#5. I don't run a non-profit. There are lots of non-profits in America - in Detroit, parts of Wall Street, etc. I run a not for profit. We're a business. The only difference is that instead of selling soap or sneakers, we sell hope and leadership.

Nancy Lublin

#6. People in Detroit aren't just urban gardening. They're starting a new mode of education. They're trying to give children the education to be "solutionaries" rather than people who are going to get jobs in the system. And that is a huge change, a cultural revolution.

Grace Lee Boggs

#7. I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, and I hate Michigan.

Jerome Bettis

#8. I think Detroit is starting to get it. We consider it a victory for the grassroots, CalCars, and the Internet-led effort.

Felix Kramer

#9. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#10. Lefty and Desdemona's cousin, Sourmelina, had gone to America and was living now in a place called Detroit. Built

Jeffrey Eugenides

#11. Detroit ... where 'mother' is half a word.

Glenn Frey

#12. I'm the 1st black platinum artist in Detroit, solo artist in Detroit.

Obie Trice

#13. I was kinda scared. I thought Detroit was gonna take me. I would've asked them for so much money they would have to put me on layaway.

Deion Sanders

#14. There's only one movie theater in the entire city of Detroit. The entire city has one open movie theater, and it is in the - it is in the General Motors headquarters complex.

Michael Moore

#15. One of my strongest memories is my father playing bongos in the living room in Detroit listening to Motown radio. He was this skinny white bald guy, but he was really moved by blues and Motown and funk.

Sufjan Stevens

#16. Detroit is big enough to matter in the world and small enough for you to matter in it.

Jeanette Pierce

#17. Faygo's like a Detroit thing, and you can't really find it everywhere, but the difference between Faygo Creme Soda and other cream sodas is that it's foamy. Faygo Creme Soda is almost like Sprite, but it's cream soda, so that's ill!

Danny Brown

#18. There are very few courses around Detroit I haven't played.

Smokey Robinson

#19. It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.

Philip Levine

#20. I grew up on the west side of Detroit - 6 mile and Wyoming - so I was really in the 'hood. And I would go to school at Detroit Waldorf, and that was not the 'hood. Growing up in Detroit was good. I had a good perspective, a well-rounded one, and not being one-sided.

Big Sean

#21. That feeling of hopelessness and racism has been looming over Detroit ever since I was a kid.

Robert Hood

#22. I see the people in Detroit are very - they're like a lot of cities, but they're very proud to be from there and they really want to see change and they really want to see good things happen.

Kid Rock

#23. I was born in Detroit. I never really saw myself working in comics, I just fell into it. But it's been one of the best things to happen to a kid from Detroit.

Dwayne McDuffie

#24. Remember Motown? Not just the driving music that swept the nation and the world, but the vibrant energy of the Motor City itself, symbolizing the heyday of America. Today, a derelict Detroit is testament to what America has squandered and what it has become.

Gerald Celente

#25. From an early age, music was my only thing. You come from Detroit, you learn how to make the most of what you can do best.

Danny Brown

#26. It's easier to record in LA than in New York and Detroit, because the space in LA is green, and there's sunshine, and I need all those positive vibes.

Big Sean

#27. I'll never forget that first night with the team. Going to the ballpark on the bus was the hardest 30 minutes of my life. I had to walk down that aisle between all the players. I really didn't know too much about the Detroit Tigers at that time.

Al Kaline

#28. In Detroit, we all talked the race game. It is a way of life.

Charlie LeDuff

#29. I started bands at a pretty young age and played with my friends back in Detroit. I've always known that I wanted to do this. It was all I was ever interested in doing. I never had, outside of music, any extracurricular activities that I took part in.

Alex Winston

#30. A couple of years ago I was seated in an auditorium in Detroit where Reverend Cleage was explaining to a conference of priests that what they called "black separatists" were in reality men who recognized the implacability of a white-imposed separation.

John Howard Griffin

#31. I was raised on gospel. I remember hip-hop and rock music were secular, so basically, for my first ten years living in Detroit, I was on gospel. But when I moved to Houston, that's when I got to open up my musical horizons.

Lizzo

#32. I'm convinced that the Great Lakes region will be at the center of an internally-focused North American economy when the hallucination of oil-powered globalism dissolves. Places like Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit will have a new life, but not at the scale of the twentieth century.

James Howard Kunstler

#33. Hollywood has turned into an emotional Detroit.

Lillian Gish

#34. Detroit is full of talent.

Martha Reeves

#35. There are many really good teams in our conference this season. Miami, Indiana and Detroit will be our fiercest opponents this year. But we just have to focus on our game and be patient with the realistic hope that we'll be on top after all is said and done.

Jason Kidd

#36. Detroit's industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.

P. J. O'Rourke

#37. I was with the Jessie Bonstelle Stock Company in Detroit and Buffalo for three seasons - 10 performances and a new play every week. She was an amazing woman who did a great deal for me.

Katharine Cornell

#38. Detroit is a place where we've had it pretty tough. But there is a generosity here and a well of kindness that goes deep.

Mitch Albom

#39. If the auto plants in Detroit would just sit around the table and say, 'What do we gotta do to make this thing work?' Instead of, 'I want this and I want that.' They might make it.

Richard DeVos

#40. Go ahead and laugh at Detroit. Because you are laughing at yourself.

Charlie LeDuff

#41. Though I'd have to say it was generally the guys in Detroit, as a group, that won the two Championships. They were terrific and I always look back very fondly.

Chuck Daly

#42. Well, there were several things. One was that the industry itself built in Detroit was abandoning the city - taking factories elsewhere, the corporate headquarters elsewhere.

David Maraniss

#43. I was born in Norway, and when I was little I went to live in Detroit, Michigan. My father was a professor of philosophy at Wayne University, and my mother was also a teacher.

Marta Kristen

#44. I believe that Detroit has a terrific geographic position. It still is a hub of one of the most important industries in the world. There's incredible engineering and other talent.

Daniel L. Doctoroff

#45. Where I grew up, in the Detroit area, there was a really good station. Sometimes you would hear songs for the first time on the radio, and if a really special song came on, somebody would turn it up, and everybody would just stop talking.

Mary Gaitskill

#46. I've performed in Auburn Hills, at The Palace, so I haven't really been in downtown Detroit, but I've been able to be here, and I can really see, what the city was. Like, I can feel why Motown started here and how amazing it was.

Jordin Sparks

#47. Some said he shouldn't save Detroit. But President Obama made the tough and right call to save more than a million American jobs in an important, iconic industry.

Harry Reid

#48. Very few cities in the NHL have the history or the following of the Detroit Red Wings.

Steve Yzerman

#49. Although I was born into the America that experiences and believes in opportunity, my trips to Ferguson, Detroit, Atlanta, and Chicago have revealed that there is an undercurrent of unease.

Rand Paul

#50. Detroit is saying that the hydrogen vehicle is the vehicle of the future. But it's 15 years from now.

Ed Markey

#51. It's a terrible thing to have to tell your fans, who have waited like Detroit's have, that their team won't win it this year. But it's better than lying to them.

Sparky Anderson

#52. What is happening in Detroit is not good so I don't even want to be a part of that, but there is something on the other side that I may want to be a part of so I don't know yet.

Kwame Kilpatrick

#53. One of the advantages, one of the special things, about playing in Detroit or Montreal is guys like Gordie Howe walk in the room. I didn't know he was here tonight, it was kind of a coincidence to get that assist on a night that he's here.

Steve Yzerman

#54. I started radio in 1950 on the Lone Ranger radio program, a dramatic show that emanated from Detroit when I was 18 years old and just beginning college. I did that for a couple of years.

Casey Kasem

#55. I played golf all over Detroit.

Smokey Robinson

#56. The first film I made was when I was 13 and it was called 'The Dogs That Ate Detroit.' It starred my Saint Bernard Barney, and it was a killer thriller with oodles of special effects that were cutting edge for the time.

Les Claypool

#57. Detroit is just like everywhere else, only more so--a lot more so.

Jerry Herron

#58. I'd watch my father get up at 5 o'clock and go down to the Eastern Market in Detroit to do the shopping for his restaurant, and get that business going and then go out on his vending machine business.

Ed Bradley

#59. I didn't want to be president; I didn't want to be governor; I didn't want to be a congress person. I just wanted to be mayor of the city of Detroit. I lived there my entire life.

Kwame Kilpatrick

#60. Governor Romney supported the bailout of Wall Street and decided not to support the bailout of Detroit.

Rick Santorum

#61. I'm from Mt. Clemens, Michigan. It's right outside Detroit. The suburbs. I was always very heavily involved in theater back then. I was always in drama club or forensics. Anything that you could do that had some performing, I was doing it.

Paul Feig

#62. I remember Detroit feeling really unsafe, feeling scared a lot. Our house was broken into, our car was stolen, we had to get a watchdog, we would get beat up in the street, I had my bike stolen. There was just a lot of real anarchy on the streets and sidewalks.

Sufjan Stevens

#63. I'm not a New Yorker. I grew up in Detroit. A lot of people think it's one big city but they're completely different.

Mike Binder

#64. I haven't reached nirvana yet, but I've been to Detroit.

David Letterman

#65. My eight years in Detroit, obviously, were my most successful years managing. I think that Pittsburgh and Detroit are probably very, very similar. We kinda rekindled the fire of baseball in Pittsburgh. We did the exact same thing in Detroit.

Jim Leyland

#66. For me to own land in Detroit, it was a badge of honor, and it was support for the city.

Manuel Moroun

#67. I quit because I didn't feel like the Detroit Lions had a chance to win. It just killed my enjoyment of the game.

Barry Sanders

#68. Abby had a little experience with the rap genre already - she used to spit rhymes with this little blond neighbor kid when she would visit her aunt and uncle in Detroit. Marshall something. Great kid. A little tightly wound.

Andrew Shaffer

#69. How wonderful it would be to meet an angel, I mused, but then I immediately realised that I already had. Not an archangel like Saint Michael, but my human engel from Detroit, wearing an overcoat and no hat, with lank brown hair and eyes the coler of water.

Patti Smith

#70. Whether it is an attempt to bomb the New York City subway system, an attempt to bring down an airplane over Detroit, an attempt to set off a bomb in Times Square ... I think that gives us a sense of the breadth of the challenges that we face, and the kinds of things that our enemy is trying to do.

Eric Holder

#71. Well, I was into music since I was a kid, ya know, back in Detroit. I say Detroit, but it was really a little suburb outside the city called Romeo.

Kid Rock

#72. The industrial powerhouse of 1950 [Detroit] is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases.

Mark Steyn

#73. I've gone to Detroit. I've been to Ferguson; I've been to Baltimore, because I want our party to be bigger, better and bolder, and I'm the only one that leads Hillary Clinton in five states that were won by President Obama. I'm a different kind of Republican.

Rand Paul

#74. Even drunk, I knew any escape plan that involved going to Detroit, Michigan, was a harbinger of doom.

Mat Johnson

#75. Detroit - and I'm not blowing smoke at anybody - is probably the greatest fan sports town in the country. They'll support anything.

William Clay Ford, Sr.

#76. I was brought up in this part of Detroit that they used to call the ghetto.

Diana Ross

#77. I grew up in Hollywood. Saying my name here is like mentioning Ford in Detroit.

Tony Goldwyn

#78. I ... had my mind blown by all the opportunities that were in California in the '60s and '70s. In Detroit, everything was Freud ... Out here, everything was Jung.

Leonard Shlain

#79. My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French.

Lorraine Bracco

#80. There were three Selma-to-Montgomery marches in March 1965, and Rosa Parks had missed the first one. Parks, whose act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, moved to Detroit two years later for safety reasons.

Douglas Brinkley

#81. I would absolutely identify as a New Yorker by nature. I grew up in Detroit. There was not a bone in my body that even considered staying in Detroit for the rest of my life.

Kristen Bell

#82. I am old enough to remember when America's K-12 public schools were the best in the world. I am a proud graduate of them, and I credit much of my success to what I learned in Detroit Public Schools and at Michigan State University.

Eli Broad

#83. All you crazy white people "I'm American!", all you did was come out of your mother's pussy on American soil. That's it. That's it! What, you think you're better than somebody from France 'cause you came out of a pussy in Detroit?

Chris Rock

#84. Hollywood - an emotional Detroit.

Lillian Gish

#85. If Detroit was a watershed concert for me, traveling with Willie Nelson through Texas and Louisiana was a milestone of a different sort.

Charley Pride

#86. I kind of grew up with hip hop and of course being from Detroit I'm a Motown man. Music is in our blood. When you're from Detroit, music is in your DNA.

Eric Thomas

#87. Phoebe regarded Kevin with eyes as chilly as a Lions uniform in the middle of a losing Detroit November.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips

#88. Since its founding, Detroit has been a place of perpetual flames. Three times the city has suffered race riots and three times the city has burned to the ground. The city's flag acknowledges as much. Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus: We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes.

Charlie LeDuff

#89. By 1946, I knew Detroit was the best hockey city in the Original Six.

Ted Lindsay

#90. I grew up not far from where Motown was founded, maybe 300 miles from Detroit and I've always liked - I used to like the way they made records. I still do, I just haven't had a chance to hear as much. They used to entertain me.

Rick Danko

#91. After three failed marriages, I know what it's like to be replaced. So that's kind of how Joey Harrington must feel today ... A former No. 1 choice looks to me like he's going to be a bust in Detroit.

Terry Bradshaw

#92. I think Detroit is already providing a model for change in the world. I think that Detroit - I mean, people come from all over the world come to see what we're doing. People are looking for a new way of living.

Grace Lee Boggs

#93. All my life I've been dealing with my race because of where I grew
up [Detroit] and being in the rap game. I'm at a boiling
point ... Anybody who pulls the race card is getting it right back in
their face.

Eminem

#94. By 1968, I had lived 10 years in Michigan. Gradually, I had come to love watching Detroit's baseball club in its small, beautiful, antiquated Tiger Stadium - a baseball park as fine as Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, though it never got the adulatory press.

Donald Hall

#95. If Disneyland was indeed the Happiest Place on Earth, you'd either keep it a secret or the price of admission would be free and not equivalent to the yearly per capita income of a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.

Paul Beatty

#96. I want to disabuse people of the idea that knowledge is power. Knowing how to get to Detroit is not the same thing as having the bus fare.

Andrew Vachss

#97. I donate heavily to the church and various churches in the Detroit community and food banks.

Aretha Franklin

#98. I consider the Detroit Red Wings one of the greatest franchises in any sport. For a player to come in and play, it's so special to wear the jersey.

Steve Yzerman

#99. But as a practical matter, Detroit's the sports city in the country.

Rick Snyder

#100. I got into Kiss before I got into anybody. The first thing I heard was 'Detroit Rock City.' I heard it in the school library, where I lived.

Brian Posehn