Harlem quotes:

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share
  • You must understand as a kid of color in those days, the Harlem Globetrotters were like being movie stars. -- Wilt Chamberlain
  • I bought a house in the Hollywood Hills and brought my grandmother from Harlem to live in it with me. -- Sammy Davis, Jr.
  • In Harlem, I got all my black friends. But when I go downtown, I got black, white, Asian, Indian friends. There's no borders, no barriers. -- ASAP Rocky
  • I was born in Harlem, raised in the South Bronx, went to public school, got out of public college, went into the Army, and then I just stuck with it. -- Colin Powell
  • 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
  • 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
  • Everybody says 'Good Morning' in Harlem because it's true! And that's lovely. -- Marcia Gay Harden
  • Living at the YMCA in Harlem dramatically broadened my view of the world. -- Constance Baker Motley
  • Michael Ralph brilliantly plays the street prophet, a West Indian who foreshadows the Harlem riot. -- Debbie Allen
  • You white folks see UFOs in your dreams. You don't hear about Martians in Harlem. -- Paul Mooney
  • We had the skirts with the slits up the side, sort of tough, sort of Spanish Harlem cool, but sweet too. -- Ronnie Spector
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • I havent 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
  • 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
  • Finding creative and effective ways to simultaneously give back and economically empower people is something that is increasingly important. Not everyone can open a business and directly create jobs in the way that we have at Red Rooster Harlem. -- Marcus Samuelsson
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • With 'Dope Walk,' I wanted to bring back kids dancing and having fun again. That's how it used to be in Harlem. I remember everybody Harlem-shaking and 'Chicken Noodle Soup'-ing. Those were some of the most fun and memorable times in my life. -- ASAP Ferg
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • When I was 17, I worked in a mentoring program in Harlem designed to improve the community. That's when I first gained an appreciation of the Harlem Renaissance, a time when African-Americans rose to prominence in American culture. For the first time, they were taken seriously as artists, musicians, writers, athletes, and as political thinkers. -- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
  • Harlem is filled with moments of history. -- Cheo Hodari Coker
  • I love Harlem, it's like a second home to me. -- Foxy Brown
  • I like to go hear jazz late-night up in Harlem. -- Daniel Boulud
  • Harlem is a very family-oriented neighborhood, and it always has been. -- Marcia Gay Harden
  • We'll start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites. -- George Preston Marshall
  • Wyatt Walker can walk through Harlem. No one would know him. -- Malcolm X
  • Harlem is really a melting pot for a lot of different people. -- Mike Colter
  • Harlem's Apollo is probably the most well-known music hall in the world. -- Shawn Amos
  • The world has white people and black people in it. Even in Harlem. -- Angela Bassett
  • --
  • Is sending the Harlem Globetrotters and Dennis Rodman to the DPRK strange? In a word, yes, -- Dennis Rodman
  • I'm just a girl from Harlem who ended up in the right place at the right time. -- Gabourey Sidibe
  • The greatest acts in colored show business had long made Harlem their home and favorite stamping ground. -- Ethel Waters
  • --
  • From 143rd Street in Harlem to the center court at Wimbledon is about as far as one can travel. -- Althea Gibson
  • You can never tell what's in a woman's mind, And if she's from Harlem, there's no use o' tryin -- William Christopher Handy
  • I think there's some great stuff coming. I do feel that. I think we have reached our Harlem Renaissance. -- Sandra Cisneros
  • I've dated interracially a lot. I grew up in Harlem, so I've dated Latins, Dominican, Guyanese, Cuban, black, white. -- Mekhi Phifer
  • As one who loves literature, art, music and history, I've been deeply rooted in the Harlem Renaissance for many years. -- Debbie Allen
  • Clinton said he feels safe in Harlem. It's the only place in the state Hillary is scared to look for him after dark. -- Craig Kilborn
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • After years of research, scientists recently reported that there is, indeed, arroz in Spanish Harlem. A full tongue and an empty brain are seldom parted. -- Francis Quarles
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • The one thing you'll notice when you're walking through Harlem is every single passing car is playing different music and there's also music that's being played out of windows. -- Cheo Hodari Coker
  • My peers at the time: you know, young black kids from off the streets of Harlem, having these conversations with me in my small, dirty little studio up in Harlem. -- Kehinde Wiley
  • I came to Harlem from West Virginia when I was three, after my mother died. My father, who was very poor, gave me up to two wonderful people, my foster parents. -- Walter Dean Myers
  • 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
  • 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
  • It's easy. [Black man] is - he's separate already. The fact that you have Harlem, the fact that you have the Negro ghetto and the so-called Negro slum, he's already separate. -- Malcolm X
  • Hugs are great, but - better than drugs? Come on. Let me put it to you this way: I never drove to Harlem at 4 a.m. to get somebody to hug me. -- Artie Lange
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • When I was at UCLA, the Harlem Globetrotters offered me a million dollars to come play for them. I turned it down because my education was just as important as playing ball. -- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • They [the police] learned something from them Harlem riots. They used to beat your head right in public, but now they only beat it after they get you down to the station house. -- Langston Hughes
  • Most of the people you look at in the early days of Harlem - the zoot suits, the music, the style of fashion, the vibrant colors - that's all influences from the south. -- Mike Colter
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • While I'm a New Yorker at heart, and 'Harlem Honey' runs through my veins, Atlanta - its awesome residents and glorious landscapes - has a special place in the hearts of my family and I. -- Kim Fields
  • 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
  • You see a lot of Baptist churches in Harlem, you see a lot of the same kind of cuisine, the soul food - there's a lot of places that remind you of its southern roots. -- Mike Colter
  • 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
  • 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
  • It was something that came sort of matter-of-factually. Because there - it's like really - real honest engagement with the people around me and just like really honestly being a little bit confused, quite frankly, about Harlem. -- Kehinde Wiley
  • 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
  • We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • When I went to the Studio Museum in Harlem, there was a type of freedom that existed where I didn't have to think about professors, where I didn't have to think about much of anything other than my own practice. -- Kehinde Wiley
  • Being in Harlem on the night of Barack Obama's election was extraordinary. It was the best street party I have ever gone to, and it felt like the period of American history which began with slavery had ended that evening. -- Hari Kunzru
  • I'm a reporter. I've been a big supporter of The Clinton Foundation. Back in 2001 and 2002, people forget that Bill Clinton went to Harlem and set this foundation up. They've helped millions of people across the globe and here in America. -- Donna Brazile
  • 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
  • When American liberals go to the UK they see the Tories as the Washington Generals, and they see the Labor Party as the Harlem Globetrotters, and they love that. Total power. Whether anything works or not is irrelevant. We work. -- Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood
  • When American liberals go to the UK they see the Tories as the Washington Generals, and they see the Labor Party as the Harlem Globetrotters, and they love that. Total power. Whether anything works or not is irrelevant. We work. -- Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood
  • 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
  • The city of Paris, France, became a place of refuge for biracial Americans during slavery and at the time of the Harlem Renaissance for black musicians, fine artists, writers and others seeking opportunities to practice their craft free from American racism. -- Sandra L. West
  • 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
  • I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch. -- James A. Baldwin
  • I never think about themes. I let the music create itself. I like it to be a potpourri of all kinds of sounds, all kinds of colors, something for everybody, from the farmer in Ireland to the lady who scrubs toilets in Harlem. -- Michael Jackson
  • Kati with an I was a New York Times Critics' Pick and I was really happy that it got a run uptown in Harlem at the Maysles Cinema, which is a great space but isn't necessarily the most well attended for a week-long screening. -- Robert Greene
  • 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
  • Many people in Harlem never go out of Harlem. I mean they'd never even been downtown. And you can see how this bitterness can accumulate. Here you see people crowded and hovered up in ghettos and slums with no hope.They see no way out. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • 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
  • I'll step in an airport just now, and people will recognize me. I'm in Harlem on 144th and whatever, and people are coming up to me like, "What's up, Chamillionaire?" And seeing it grow is, nothing turning into something, that feeling is a really good feeling. -- Chamillionaire
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • When you look at Harlem - and I lived there almost five years - most of the people who live in Harlem are transplants. They migrate to Harlem from another place. A lot of them are from the south, so they bring those southern influences with them. -- Mike Colter
  • --
  • I don't know why people always compare me [ with Amiri Baraka] I was never part of the Black Arts Repertory Theater or the Black Arts Movement; people who claim that I was are wrong. I was downtown. I was living in Chelsea when they were operating in Harlem. -- Ishmael Reed
  • If I go up to Harlem or down to Sixth Street, and I'm not dressed up or I'm not wearing my jewelry, then the people feel I'm talking down to them. People expect to see Mrs. Astor, not some dowdy old lady, and I don't intend to disappoint. -- Brooke Astor
  • I was playing organ at a silent movie house at Harlem and they'd be showing some death scene on the screen. Likely as not, I'd grab a bottle and start swingin' out on 'Squeeze Me' or 'Royal Garden Blues'. The managers complained but, heck, they couldn't stop me! -- Fats Waller
  • I especially like Duke Ellington jazz, which is a little more... I lived in New York for a while. I lived in Harlem for a bit, and I just fell in love with the idea of that era of New York, that jazz era, especially jazz in Harlem. -- Charlie Day
  • Old New York City is a friendly old town From Washington Heights to Harlem on down There's a-mighty many people all millin' all around They'll kick you when you're up and knock you when you're down It's hard times in the city Livin' down in New York town -- Bob Dylan
+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share