Top 100 Quotes About Illinois
#1. He made the country down in Illinois, and He made the Missouri", the little girl continued. "I guess somebody else made the country in these parts. It's not nearly so well done. They forgot the water and the trees.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#2. In the Illinois State Capitol, in Springfield, farmer-legislators write the agriculture laws.
Bill Dedman
#3. The Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500 million tons of it there every year. The business of the Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.
Charles Kuralt
#4. I have a doctorate in fine arts from Knox College in Illinois. All I did was give a speech, and now everybody has to call me Dr. Colbert.
Stephen Colbert
#5. I've been very engaged in Illinois and Chicago civic activities for a long time; mostly around building businesses and helping entrepreneurs grow companies, but also around education and education reform.
Bruce Rauner
#6. I was living on the wrong side of the tracks in Evanston, Illinois, in a home for boys. We had these Jackson 5 records. I really related to their voices - they were about my age, but they were doing it.
Eddie Vedder
#7. In Illinois, where legislators are paid $45,000, plus as much as $10,000 for leadership work, about half are full-time politicians.
Bill Dedman
#8. Reagan grows up in 1920s Dixon, Illinois, and it's the heartland of America. It's a time when Americans are particularly drawn to this small town world because it's beginning to pass.
Robert Dallek
#9. As a youngster I worked the river boats going down the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, pushing barges to Chicago, then all the way down to New Orleans.
Clint Walker
#10. For the first time in my life, I became actively interested in a book. Me the sports fanatic, me the game freak, me the only ten-year-old in Illinois with a hate on for the alphabet wanted to know what happened next.
William Goldman
#11. Illinois corn farmers are the Nation's number two exporter of feed grains.
John Shimkus
#12. From my new release, Cry for Me.
This is Bryen talking.
"Stop it, T! I knew; my God I predicted you would do this! Start blaming yourself for the sins of my sick brother. He's left a stench of rottenness from here to Illinois!
Toni Mariani
#13. The meetings of the legislature at Springfield then first brought together that splendid group of young men of genius whose phenomenal careers and distinguished services have given Illinois fame in the history of the nation.
John George Nicolay
#14. 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
#15. I'm among the first girls ever to play Little League baseball, and to my knowledge, the very first in western Illinois. It was 1976, and I was a nine-year-old tomboy whose older brothers had played.
Therese Fowler
#16. Illinois preschoolers were temporarily saved from the debilitating effects of cereal and milk.
Barack Obama
#17. 'Look at Me' started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That's an abstract idea; you don't think that's going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting.
Jennifer Egan
#18. Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes
Herman Melville
#19. And so Jefferson wrote the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which organized the new territories of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin so that slavery would be permanently illegal there.
Allen C. Guelzo
#20. I am committed to working with Speaker Hastert and the other members of the Illinois congressional delegation to do all that I can to ensure that Illinois' funding needs are adequately met.
Bill Lipinski
#21. [O]ne might ask why, in a galaxy of a few hundred billion stars, the aliens are so intent on coming to Earth at all. It would be as if every vertebrate in North America somehow felt drawn to a particular house in Peoria, Illinois. Are we really that interesting?
Seth Shostak
#22. What Dred Scott's master might lawfully do with Dred Scott, in the free state of Illinois, every other master may lawfully do with any other one, or 1,000 slaves, in Illinois, or in any other free state.
Roger B. Taney
#23. Illinois is the only state where the present governor rides around in a car whose license plate was made by a previous governor.
David Letterman
#24. Native Americans were driven off their land. Lincoln even took part in the Black Hawk campaign against the Native Americans in Illinois. While they were being exterminated and driven off their land, Whites were collecting assets.
Ishmael Reed
#25. There could not be a more stark contrast between Wisconsin and Illinois.
Scott Walker
#26. My grandfather and dad worked at General American Transportation Corp. in Chicago, a company that made tank cars and freight cars. We had a pragmatic, Republican, manufacturing, Illinois consciousness as far as employment went.
Bill Moseley
#27. I literally integrated the small town of Libertyville, Illinois. I was the first person of color to reside within its borders.
Tom Morello
#28. But, also, before I even go on the Medicare prescription drug debate, I always tell the folks in rural Illinois, and I represent 30 counties south of Springfield down to Indiana and Kentucky, that in this bill is the best rural package for hospitals ever passed.
John Shimkus
#29. I was raised Catholic in Rockford, Illinois. But I'm not a practicing Catholic anymore. Oh God, no.
Natasha Leggero
#30. I was born and grew up in Vandalia, Illinois, a small town of about 6,000. It was farm country, and this was the little county seat.
June Squibb
#31. We're from Rockford, Illinois, but we've always thought international.
Robin Zander
#32. Miles Davis, his parents migrated from Arkansas to Illinois, where he had the luxury of being able to practice for hours upon hours. He never would have been able to do that in the cotton country of Arkansas.
Isabel Wilkerson
#33. Our prayers at this time are prompted by the fact that the Governor of Illinois today is signing into Illinois law the redefinition of civil marriage, introducing not only an unprecedented novelty into our state law, but also institutionalizing an objectively sinful reality.
Thomas J. Paprocki
#34. To my great disappointment, it appears that the politics of division are making a big comeback. Many Americans share my disappointment - especially those who were filled with great hope a few years ago, when then-Senator Obama announced his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois.
Paul Ryan
#35. I hear you have abolitionists here. We have a few in Illinois, but we shot one the other day.
Abraham Lincoln
#36. Tonight we send a message to our party that here in Illinois, there will be a new generation of Republican leaders and we will fight to provide a better tomorrow for future generations. We've made clear the status quo is no longer acceptable.
Adam Kinzinger
#37. I was born in 1970 in Illinois, but all the life I remember I've spent in Chapel Hill, N.C.
Sarah Dessen
#38. Many seventh graders I know in Illinois, as well as around the Nation, are studying the Constitution. I was pretty impressed with the quality of education our children are receiving because they had not expected me to ask them about it.
Melissa Bean
#39. If there's any success that I've had, it is a direct reflection of the people I work with. We have a very smart team and an extremely hardworking team, both here in Washington and back in Illinois.
Cheri Bustos
#41. Things like this don't happen back in Libertyville, Illinois.
You don't get lost in the woods behind your house.
You don't get trapped inside a fortress-like wall ten feet tall.
Travis Thrasher
#42. Where do business leaders turn for advice to improve their leadership skills? Many successful leaders like Dan Cathy, President and COO of Chick-fil-A turn to the Bible. Speaking at Trinity College in Illinois, "Cathy discussed how scripture dictates Chick-fil-A's business plan.
R.J. Stepansky
#43. I was enamored of New York City intellectual life and was really into Philip Roth because I was raised by self-loathing Midwesterners who were from southern Illinois, who felt like fish out of water when they came to the East Coast when I was a kid.
Meghan Daum
#44. Where gays and lesbians are the best organized and most concentrated in numbers are states that President Clinton must carry in order to be reelected in 1996. Among the states are California, New York, Michigan, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, Illinois.
David Mixner
#45. I love the Midwest. I think about it every day. I wonder if I would rather have a little farm in the Midwest, in Illinois or Wisconsin, or would I rather have like a little getaway up in the mountains of Colorado.
Joe Lando
#46. When I was in high school, my uncle, who went to the races quite a bit, got me interested. Then when I went to college at Southern Illinois University, just a few hours from Louisville, we used to go to the Kentucky Derby, and I got to see Secretariat and Riva Ridge win.
Kenny Troutt
#47. I got an assistantship in physics at the University of Illinois, and I tore up my steno books.
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
#48. I grew up in a small town in Illinois, and my dad was a basketball coach. Thanks to him, I have excellent fundamentals in both basketball and baseball.
Nick Offerman
#49. My profession is about as far away from growing up in southern Illinois as you can get.
Laurie Metcalf
#50. I was born in Chicago, then I spent most of my youth in Joliet, Illinois which is about thirty minutes south, and I went to a military academy for high school in Wisconsin. Then I went to college, on a basketball scholarship to a small school in Iowa, so I'm like Mr. Midwest.
Adam Rapp
#51. Almost 70 percent of U.S. ag exports travel the upper Mississippi River and the Illinois waterway system.
Jerry Costello
#52. My uncles, who are farmers in Minooka, Illinois - I grew up with them and their pickup trucks and mustaches, and to me that was masculinity: big hairy sweaty guys who could pick up a bus.
Nick Offerman
#53. I grew up mostly in Champaign, Illinois. My dad was at the University of East Illinois, so I was always around the music. One of my dad's buddies was the avant-garde composer John Cage, so I picked up on that weird classical and eclectic music.
Stuart Hamm
#54. Obama might do well to remember that his fast rise from the Illinois state Senate was due in large part to an uncanny ability to make friends and find mentors.
Ron Fournier
#55. Yet most of the time that I'm awake, I want to cut. Not small words either. Equivocate. Inarticulate. Duplicitous. At my hospital back in Illinois they would not approve of this craving.
Gillian Flynn
#56. Tonight Illinois has set a tone for the nation, that we won't stand idle hoping that our economy improves. This is a brand new day for the Illinois Republican Party.
Adam Kinzinger
#57. Seventy-five years ago I was born in Tampico, Illinois, in a little flat above the bank building. We didn't have any other contact with the bank than that.
Ronald Reagan
#58. In politics, you never know who's going to die, retire, or - in Illinois - get indicted.
Aaron Schock
#59. Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious - and therefore immoral - I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.
George Ryan
#60. I grew up among farmers in Illinois and so you always have to have the tools you might need in the eventuality of a flat tire or a broken window.
Nick Offerman
#61. Tornadoes were, in out part of Central Illinois, the dimensionless point at which parallel lines met and whirled and blew up. They made no sense.
David Foster Wallace
#62. I have lectured at Town Hall N.Y., The Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Wellesley, Columbia, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana State University, Colorado, Stanford, and scores of other places.
Paul Engle
#63. Sure, there were people from Missouri and Illinois who grew up Cardinals fans and migrated to New York for work or love. Cardinals fans congregate periodically at Foley's near Herald Square to root for the team of their childhood, up there on the TV screen.
George Vecsey
#64. According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.
George Will
#65. I grew up in Danville, Illinois, right in the middle of the state.
Dick Van Dyke
#66. Political leaders in Illinois kicked the can down the road, raised taxes, and ignored fiscal realities. Now, they're realizing the consequences of their actions: credit downgrades and negative outlooks.
Scott Walker
#67. I grew up in central Illinois midway between Chicago and St. Louis and I made an historic blunder. All my friends became Cardinals fans and grew up happy and liberal and I became a Cubs fan and grew up embittered and conservative.
George Will
#68. For all of his early promise on a law school faculty and his seat in the Illinois Senate, Obama in 2002 had no money, no political organization and a name that rhymed with the world's most famous terrorist.
Anonymous
#69. Let's put aside the politics and trust the people. Let's embrace the unique opportunity we all have; take the heat and make the hard and difficult decisions, knowing that we're doing it to make things better for the people of Illinois.
Rod Blagojevich
#70. The official language of the State of Illinois shall be known hereafter as the American language, and not the English language.
Frank Church
#71. Illinois has less than a 12 percent black population and I won with 55 percent of the vote.
Carol Moseley Braun
#72. I lived on a farm in Illinois, and we didn't have a lot of money. But I lived vicariously through magazines. I was obsessed with Jean Paul Gaultier. I still have the scrapbooks, and I've kept all my designs and sketches.
Melissa McCarthy
#73. I had a teacher who recommended I take improv classes in Chicago - I'm from Evanston, Illinois - so I did improv classes at Improv Olympic, and that kind of opened me up.
Lauren Lapkus
#74. As a grandson of farmers in downstate Illinois, I have long admired the dedication of farmers to their work and have written about the role of agriculture in American innovation.
Edmund Phelps
#75. To the people of Illinois let me say this. Business as usual IS OVER.
Bruce Rauner
#76. Like most other states, Illinois has little regulation of the economic interests of legislators and relies on public disclosure to keep the lawmaking honest.
Bill Dedman
#77. Illinois is a state of suspended animation and the people live in hibernation from Oct. to whenever it ever gets warmer.
John O'Hara
#78. A man from Iowa or Illinois will say 'I'm from the Middle West'..a Georgian or a Mississipian may admit to being merely a Southerner ... but no Texan, given the opportunity, ever said otherwise than 'I'm from Texas'.
J. Frank Dobie
#79. We may continue to expect the enjoyment of all the blessings of civil and religious liberty, guaranteed by the Constitution. The citizens of Illinois have done themselves honor, in throwing the mantle of the Constitution over a persecuted and afflicted people.
Joseph Smith Jr.
#80. The Illinois Senate passed a bill on Wednesday to legalize medical marijuana. The bill was passed after the state senator said, 'Come on, dude, pass it. Come on.'
Jimmy Fallon
#81. Arden Shore Camp in Lake Bluff, Illinois, a camp for poor children and those at risk for delinquency.
Joan Wehlen Morrison
#82. The first time I met President Obama was 2006 in Baghdad. He was the senator from Illinois; it was a month before he actually ended up declaring. He had to come to Baghdad to kind of check that box, and I was the correspondent for 'Newsweek' at the time.
Michael Hastings
#84. I used to race at the YMCA in Crystal Lake, Illinois, they used to have a dirt track there, and there was also a track near Rockford, Illinois, that I would go to.
Matt Skiba
#85. The comedy for the Democrats is that they're showing off too much. They need to be putting a boring white guy out there to kind of get a hold of things. Once the boring white guy is out there, then you bust out the junior senator from Illinois who smokes and does cocaine.
Tina Fey
#86. Surely it's better to live in the country, to live on a prairie by a drawing of rivers, in Iowa or Illinois or Indiana, say, than in any city, in any stinking fog of human beings, in any blooming orchard of machines. It ought to be.
William H Gass
#87. Governor Ford is sworn to support the Constitution of the United States and also of this State Illinois, and these constitutions guarantee religious as well as civil liberty to all religious societies whatever.
Joseph Smith Jr.
#88. Justin Butterfield of Illinois, a Federalist-turned-Whig, said of the Mexican-American War, said, "I opposed one war and it ruined me. From now on I am for war, pestilence and famine.
Michael S. Green
#89. Historian David M. Potter pointed out in 1942 that as president-elect, Lincoln was no more than "simply a lawyer from Springfield, Illinois - a man of great undeveloped capacities and narrowly limited background. He was more fit to become President than to be President.
Harold Holzer
#90. There are some who might say that somebody named Barack Obama can't be elected senator in the state of Illinois. They're probably the same folks who said that a guy named Rod Blagojevich couldn't be elected governor of the state of Illinois.
Barack Obama
#91. It's certainly a loss for us here at the University of Washington, because Jeff Compher has been a wonderful friend and administrator. Jeff is a football man first, but he has the compassion and desire to make all of Northern Illinois' programs successful. He's one heck of a guy.
Tyrone Willingham
#92. She knows she is in Chicago. But she does not yet realize that she is in Illinois.
Lydia Davis
#93. President Obama's fight for rural America is personal. He was raised by a single mom and grandparents from Kansas. He hails from a farming state, Illinois.
Tom Vilsack
#94. We hunt in Florida, where I live in Jay. I hunt in Alabama a little bit, on my uncle's land. I go to Illinois and hunt with some friends up there. I hunt in Mississippi and Missouri.
Boo Weekley
#95. I just went home to Illinois, and I asked my family, 'Are you guys planning on talking in those accents the whole time I'm home?' And my mother said, 'You used to talk like that, too, Tasha.' And I said, 'Yes, but you see, I've reinvented myself. Do you have any idea who I think I am?'
Natasha Leggero
#96. Train service is particularly vital for the students and employees of Southern Illinois University.
Jerry Costello
#97. National legislation will prevent other states' flawed concealed-weapons laws from threatening the safety of Illinois residents,
Barack Obama
#99. We shall lie down," Lincoln warned, "pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State." Lincoln
Eric Foner
#100. You may pronounce the sentence upon me, honourable judge, but let the world know that in A.D. 1886, in the State of Illinois, eight men were sentenced to death because they believed in a better future; because they had not lost their faith in the ultimate victory of liberty and justice!
August Spies
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