Top 100 Quotes About Harlem
#1. Crisis' seems to be too mild a word to describe conditions in countless African-American communities. It is beyond crisis when in the richest nation in the world, African Americans in Harlem live shorter lives than the people of Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations of the world.
Johnnetta B. Cole
#2. In Harlem, black was white. You had rights that could not be denied you; you had privileges, protected by law. And you had money. Everybody in Harlem had money. It was a land of plenty.
Rudolph Fisher
#3. What makes Harlem special is that at any given time, food seekers can not only find food deeply rooted in Southern, Latin and African traditions, but also can taste the newer Senegalese, Chinese, and Italian influences as well.
Marcus Samuelsson
#5. I don't have to really be in the 60s. Every time I hail a cab in New York, and they pass me by and pick up the white person, then I get a dose of it. Or when they don't want to take you to Harlem. I grew up with that.
Queen Latifah
#6. I'm lucky to live in New York, a city that offers so many options for lunch. I can pick up dumplings from a Midtown food truck, grab empanadas by the dozen in Spanish Harlem or get a fantastic bowl of ramen in the East Village.
Marcus Samuelsson
#7. At first, Hendrix went and became a superstar in London, but if he walked past the Apollo in Harlem, no one would know who he was. I'm the hip-hop version of him.
Nayvadius Cash
#8. The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.
Aberjhani
#9. In the Bronx, you have the southern Italians; in Queens, the Greeks, Koreans and Chinese; in Brooklyn, the Jewish community; and in Harlem, the Hispanics - all with their own markets.
Daniel Boulud
#10. There are other tracks that are more reliant upon the beat. Like nobody's going to sit there and play "Harlem Shake" on the guitar!
Andrew Wyatt
#11. Any kid that feels like they don't have any kind of future, whether they're on a street corner in Harlem or in a little town in Kansas where nothing happens, it's all out there for them. They can do whatever they dream or wish or see on television, or read about in the papers.
James Brolin
#12. Harlem was the main chance for the east end of New York, for eastsiders, as that real estate boom that took place in the 1890s - and it was a preposterous one where people bought and sold, and everything appreciated with each sale - and eventually, of course, the house of cards would crumble.
David Levering Lewis
#13. You must understand as a kid of color in those days, the Harlem Globetrotters were like being movie stars.
Wilt Chamberlain
#14. It is important to have permanent safe spaces in Harlem.
Geoffrey Canada
#15. I'm sort of obsessed with Harlem. Just its history. My father did the music for a play called 'The Huey P. Newton Story,' and they did a lot of work in Harlem. So as a little girl, I spent a lot of time in Harlem Library.
Tessa Thompson
#16. Thinking back to boyhood days, I remember the bright sun on Harlem streets, the easy rhythms of black and brown bodies, the sounds of children streaming in and out of red brick tenements.
Walter Dean Myers
#17. I like to go hear jazz late-night up in Harlem.
Daniel Boulud
#18. I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like 'Tristan,' goat's milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike 'Aida,' parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.
Langston Hughes
#19. There were the people that believed in me when I was walking around Spanish Harlem, saying that I was going to be a Hollywood actress. They were like, 'Yeah, you could do it!'
Paula Garces
#20. Ghetto was from Newark and Spazo was from the Polo Grounds in Harlem. Ghetto's family lived in Harlem.
Dion Perkins
#21. Harlem was an exciting place in the '50s. There were nightclubs that, as a student of Columbia, you dashed off to. The community seemed very viable still.
David Levering Lewis
#22. Man I mean, the great thing about playing clubs in Harlem is people have an appreciation not just for the music but for the history of the music.
Christian Scott
#23. Using the Africanist model, each generation should take the family name to a higher place. My father's folks were sharecroppers in South Carolina. He went to Harlem. They were still poor, but they moved up. If my parents didn't do this and offer me this background, I wouldn't be here.
Ving Rhames
#24. If there was a Harlem Globetrotters of rugby league, he'd be in it.
Brett Morris
#25. The people in his Harlem did not speak, they sang their way through conversations and disagreements,
Bernice L. McFadden
#26. [T]he piano was to Harlem what brass bands had been to New Orleans. The instrument represented conflicting possibilities -- a pathway for assimilating traditional highbrow culture, a calling card of lowbrow nightlife, a symbol of middle-class prosperity, or, quite simply, a means of making a living.
Ted Gioia
#27. One Harlem preacher likens us to the pink plastic spoons at Baskin Robbins: we give the world a foretaste of what lies ahead, the vision of the Biblical prophets. In a world gone astray we should be activity demonstrating here and now God's will for the planet.
Philip Yancey
#28. It doesn't do good to open doors for someone who doesn't have the price to get in. If he has the price, he may not need the laws. There is no law saying the Negro has to live in Harlem or Watts.
Ronald Reagan
#29. In Africa, you have no clean water, but you have good food options. In Harlem, everyone can shower and get fresh water, but you often have bad food options.
Marcus Samuelsson
#30. That was 1993 grunge in suburbia. This was 2003 hell in Harlem. (Dark City Lights)
Eve Kagan
#32. The Negro and all things negroid had become a fad, and Harlem had become a shrine to which feverish pilgrimages were in order ... Seventh Avenue was the gorge into which Harlem cliff dwellers crowded to promenade.
Wallace Thurman
#33. I am a chef through and through. Everything I do - whether it is cooking for kids in Harlem or cooking in a fine dining establishment - all my days are consumed by food.
Marcus Samuelsson
#34. I grew up in Harlem in New York, very rough, urban environment, and so what I found is that, if I can have kids travel to different places, countries, areas, it can expand their minds.
Ving Rhames
#35. I majored in directing. However, I did spend some time at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, so I am somewhat well-versed in African Studies.
Chadwick Boseman
#36. Melting pot Harlem-Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall. Dusky dream Harlem rumbling into a nightmare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown.
Langston Hughes
#37. I've worked over four dozen nine-to-five jobs before taking the chance to chase my dream of wanting to become an actor and filmmaker. Growing up in Brooklyn and Harlem, working at jobs like the bus company were great. I had benefits, a great salary, and security. But it wasn't my dream.
Malcolm Goodwin
#38. I appreciate being able to give back to charities I care about such as the American Diabetes Association - my older sister passed away from diabetes - and Figure Skating in Harlem, which teaches young girls about confidence, focus and goal-setting.
Tamara Tunie
#40. Eric Walrond, handsome, cosmopolitan, and beguilingly enigmatic, may have been the most promising literary talent of the Harlem Renaissance ... James Davis's finely written, beautifully paced Eric Walrond is a major biography of a fascinating figure.
David Levering Lewis
#41. And Alpo ordered guys to slaughter guys, and the whole Harlem was in tears when Rich Porter died.
Cam'ron
#42. I don't write police stories, per se, but I usually write about areas that are very panoramic, like Harlem, or the Lower East Side, or a small urban city like Jersey City.
Richard Price
#43. What do we call our Harlem Renaissance? Maybe in the future, it won't be just Latino, maybe it'll be more multi-multi, because, you know, people are such fusions now, of so many different cultures.
Sandra Cisneros
#44. Growing up in Harlem, I had the chance to practice with a Negro League team. At fifteen, I was over six feet tall and a fair athlete, but my skills didn't come close to some of the players I saw.
Walter Dean Myers
#45. I disagree with Muhammad. I'm against hate, anti-Semitism and homophobia. ... This is not a village of hate. It's a village of hope. ... Don't let midgets give us a bad name. There are still giants in Harlem giants who will stand up for our children.
Al Sharpton
#46. I love Harlem, it's like a second home to me.
Foxy Brown
#47. I grew up in Harlem Grant projects, and I didn't have a whole lot then. I've always been good about only getting what I need, not what I want. Just because someone else has something, I don't feel the need to.
Keith Sweat
#48. As a Latino growing up in Spanish harlem, it's not easy trying not to be hot-headed.
Erik Estrada
#49. I grew up in Harlem, a block away from what was then the most crowded block in New York City, according to the 1950 census. Something like ten thousand people lived in one city block.
Samuel R. Delany
#50. You know why Madison Avenue advertising has never done well in Harlem? We're the only ones who know what it means to be Brand X.
Dick Gregory
#51. Whether or not anybody had invented the category in his lifetime, Babe Ruth was surely the Greatest Living Yankee almost immediately upon lofting home runs at the Polo Grounds, allowing the Yankees to build their own palace across the Harlem River.
George Vecsey
#52. I haven't seen a professional player come out of New York in over 20 years since my brother Patrick came out. Blake spent a few years in Harlem, but he moved to Connecticut when he was a kid.
John McEnroe
#54. You grow up in America and you're told from day one, 'This is the land of opportunity.' That everybody has an equal chance to make it in this country. And then you look at places like Harlem, and you say, 'That is absolutely a lie.'
Geoffrey Canada
#55. It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks.
Clement Alexander Price
#56. I've lived all over the world, but Harlem is very special to me, and when I decided to open a restaurant near my home, I didn't want it to be business as usual.
Marcus Samuelsson
#57. We had the skirts with the slits up the side, sort of tough, sort of Spanish Harlem cool, but sweet too.
Ronnie Spector
#58. Despite everything that Harlem did to our generation, I think it gave something to a few. It gave them a strength that couldn't be obtained anywhere else.
Claude Brown
#59. For me, growing up in Harlem and then migrating down to SoHo and the Lower East Side and chillin' down there and making that my stomping ground ... That was a big thing, because I'm from Harlem, and downtown is more artsy and also more open-minded. So I got the best of both worlds.
ASAP Rocky
#60. I went through various stages in my childhood, as we all do, various stages of obsessions with people and things. And I did. I wanted to be the first white Harlem Globetrotter.
Johnny Depp
#61. The Harlem of my books was never meant to be real; I never called it real; I just wanted to take it away from the white man if only in my books.
Chester Himes
#62. It's about stories. If I can tell the story to America, whether it's Riesling or a boxer from Harlem, it will sell. I know on my gravestone it's going to be, 'Storyteller.'
Gary Vaynerchuk
#63. I grew up on 135th Street. I grew up on the poor side of New York. I grew up in Harlem.
John Catsimatidis
#64. Harlem is a stage. It's like its own planet, from the way we dress to the swag in the way we walk and talk.
Teyana Taylor
#65. I bought a house in the Hollywood Hills and brought my grandmother from Harlem to live in it with me.
Sammy Davis Jr.
#66. Before I started LimoLand, I mainly bought my clothes in Harlem, where I found clothing my size in fun colors. I still like to go there and see the vibrancy and colors of the neighborhood. I am also very influenced by the colors of my contemporary African and Japanese art collections.
Jean Pigozzi
#67. I worked at an old folks' home once in Harlem, and I was an activities volunteer. I used to do all these plays with the old people. I did 'The Wizard of Oz;' it was adapted. There was a guy there who played the harmonica, so we had an overture, and The Wizard was 96.
Tony Danza
#68. I got Sonny up to Harlem, and we started street playin' in New York. We did that for three or four years and survived. We brought it back to the streets again.
Brownie McGhee
#69. As long as what is is-and Georgia is Georgia-I will take Harlem for mine. At least, if trouble comes, I will have my own window to shoot from.
Langston Hughes
#70. I want people to take pride in Spanish Harlem. These are people that everyone in the community could relate to ... people who mean something special to us.
James De La Vega
#71. My grandfather taught me generosity. He sold snow cones in Harlem. I went with him at 5 and he let me hand out the change and snow cones. I learned a lot in the couple of years that we did that.
Erik Estrada
#72. Hurry, get on board, it's comin', listen to those rails a-thrumming all aboard. Get on the "A" train, soon you will be on Sugar Hill in Harlem.
Duke Ellington
#73. Harlem's Apollo is probably the most well-known music hall in the world.
Shawn Amos
#74. It was a pretty rough neighborhood where I grew up The really tough places were over around Third Avenue where it ran into the Harlem River, but we weren't far away.
Norman Rockwell
#75. I got a job as a children's librarian at PS 175 in Harlem, and that changed everything. That was an epiphany. I didn't know Harlem existed. I didn't know there was such a place, because I grew up in white Queens, where five miles is 100 miles.
Lynne Stewart
#76. From 143rd Street in Harlem to the center court at Wimbledon is about as far as one can travel.
Althea Gibson
#78. The thing that surprised me the most is just how much money women that weren't rich were paying for their hair. When you're in a beauty parlor in Harlem next to abandoned buildings and somebody's paying five grand for a weave, that's a bit much.
Chris Rock
#79. We get along, we talk music.Lenny Kravitz took me to Harlem to see this little jazz show in the back of a church. It was just shitty fluorescent lights and a small stage piano, but this band tore it up.
Penn Dayton Badgley
#80. Motherfuckers from Harvard to Harlem respect the Pew Research Center, and hearing this, the concerned patrons turned around in their squeaky plastic seats as best they could, given that donut shop swivel chairs swivel only six degrees in either direction.
Paul Beatty
#81. I was to be a justifier, my task would be to deny the unpredictable human element of all Harlem so that they could ignore it when it in any way interfered with their plans.
Ralph Ellison
#82. I had seen the photographs of Harlem in its glory days, stylish men in bespoke suits, women so well dressed that they'd put the models in 'Vogue' to shame. I knew that Harlemites loved to dance, to pray, and to eat.
Marcus Samuelsson
#83. Walking through Harlem first thing in the morning was like being a single drop of blood inside an enormous body that was waking up. Brick and mortar, elevated train tracks, and miles of underground pipe, this city lived; day and night it thrived.
Victor LaValle
#84. Is sending the Harlem Globetrotters and Dennis Rodman to the DPRK strange? In a word, yes,
Dennis Rodman
#85. You white folks see UFOs in your dreams. You don't hear about Martians in Harlem.
Paul Mooney
#86. Dance Theatre of Harlem has done a lot of good things well, a lot of good things badly, and a lot of bad things - it doesn't matter how.
Robert Gottlieb
#87. In the invincible and indescribable squalor of Harlem ... I was tormented. I felt caged, like an animal. I wanted to escape. I felt if I did not get out I would slowly strangle.
James A. Baldwin
#88. I grew up in Harlem, and the kids used to tease me. You know that song 'Bingo'? Well, they used to sing, 'V-i-n-g-o, and Vingo was his name-o.'
Ving Rhames
#89. Michael Ralph brilliantly plays the street prophet, a West Indian who foreshadows the Harlem riot.
Debbie Allen
#90. I've dated interracially a lot. I grew up in Harlem, so I've dated Latins, Dominican, Guyanese, Cuban, black, white.
Mekhi Phifer
#91. After I'd been in college for a couple years I'd read Shakespeare and Frost and Chaucer and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I'd come to appreciate how gorgeous the English language could be. But most fantasy novels didn't seem to make the effort.
Patrick Rothfuss
#93. Blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society. If I had put all of my police officers on Park Avenue and none in Harlem, thousands and thousands more blacks would've been killed during the eight years that I was mayor.
Rudy Giuliani
#94. All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.
James A. Baldwin
#95. The police can go to downtown Harlem and pick up a kid with a joint in the streets. But they can't go into the elegant apartments and get a stockbroker who's sniffing cocaine.
Noam Chomsky
#96. I was a kid who liked art and theater and dance and music, but if you lived in Harlem, high culture was somewhere else, and it wasn't black.
Samuel R. Delany
#97. The riot isn't seen in the movie, but it is alluded to. He has this one speech that gives a great sense of texture and paints a picture of what was happening in Harlem then.
Debbie Allen
#98. My fellow Wilmington, North Carolina native Meadowlark Lemon is a true national treasure. I watched him play for the Harlem Globetrotters when I was growing up and his skill with the basketball and dedication to the game were an inspiration not only to me, but to kids all around the world.
Michael Jordan
#99. 'Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream' is an intentionally angry film. How could it not be when the chance of an infant dying is five times greater on the Bronx Park Avenue than on Manhattan's Park Avenue just across the Harlem River?
Alex Gibney
#100. Harlem is not a playground for rich bankers and consultants. It's got students of all colors. It's got old people who keep history and tell tall tales.
Marcus Samuelsson
