San Francisco

San Francisco is a cultural, commercial, and financial center in Northern California. San Francisco is the 16th most populous city in the United States, and the fourth most populous in California. It covers an area of about 46.89 square miles (121.4 square kilometers), mostly at the north end of the San Francisco Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area, making it the second most densely populated large U.S. city. San Francisco was founded on June 29, 1776, when colonists from Spain established the Presidio of San Francisco at the Golden Gate and Mission San Francisco de Asís a few miles away, both named for Francis of Assisi.

In World War II, San Francisco was a major port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater. After the war, the confluence of returning servicemen, significant immigration, liberalizing attitudes, along with the rise of the "beatnik" and "hippie" countercultures, the Sexual Revolution, the Peace Movement growing from opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War, and other factors led to the Summer of Love and the LGBT rights in the United States movement, cementing San Francisco as a center of liberal activism in the United States.

Quotes

Alphabetized by author or source

A

I don't believe that there is a blasé person in the State. Credit that to the earthquake. The catastrophe, too, will be a great factor in the future greatness of San Francisco, just as the fires of London were in the making of that city a world metropolis."
- Gertrude Atherton, "Novelist Rescues Manuscript from Occidental Hotel", San Francisco Call (May 2, 1906, p. 7)

C

If I do go to heaven, I'm going to do what every San Franciscan does who goes to heaven. He looks around and says, "It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco."
- Unknown resident, as quoted by Herb Caen in "Words from the heart' in USA Today (16 February 2001), page D4

Isn't it nice that people who prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco live there?
- Herb Caen, as quoted in The Portable Curmudgeon (1992) by Jon Winokur, p. 174.

D

Chinese children are in American schools in San Francisco. None of our children are in Chinese schools, and probably never will be, though in some things they might well teach us valuable lessons. Contact with these yellow children of the Celestial Empire would convince us that the points of human difference, great as they, upon first sight, seem, are as nothing compared with the points of human agreement. Such contact would remove mountains of prejudice.
- Frederick Douglass, "Our Composite Nationality" (7 December 1869), Boston, Massachusetts.

F

Such was life in the Golden Gate:
Gold dusted all we drank and ate,
And I was one of the children told,
'We all must eat our peck of gold.'
- Robert Frost, A Peck of Gold (1926)

G

This ain’t America, this is San Francisco.
- R. Garcia y Robertson, Four Kings and an Ace (1990), reprinted in The Moon Maid and Other Fantastic Adventures (1998), ISBN 0-9655901-8-6, p. 56

H

I'd thought it would be something like King's Road [London], only more. Somehow I expected them all to own their own little shops, because I heard they'd all bought out blocks. I expected them all to be nice and clean and friendly and happy.
- George Harrison expressing disenchantment with the "hideous, spotty little teenagers" he found in the "Summer of Love" hippies of San Francisco's famous “hippie haven” i.e., the Haight-Ashbury district, which he visited on 7 August 1967, as quoted in The Love You Make : An Insider's Story of the Beatles (2002) by Peter Brown, Steven S. Gaines, p. 235

East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State.
- O. Henry, in "A Municipal Report"

J

San Francisco’s dramatic decline makes a lot more sense after Monday night’s mayoral debate revealed what far-left incumbent London Breed thinks is the most important part of the job.
- Tristan Justice, "San Francisco’s London Breed Thinks The Mayor’s Top Job Is Naming Drag Queens", The Federalist (June 19, 2024)

K

Dimanche, le vent du large tempère le soleil sur la jetée de San Francisco. Les familles se promènent, sans souci des regards d‘autrui. Chacun est dans la recherche de son bien-être. Un esprit bricoleur et commerçant a fabriqué une sorte de pédalo collectif qui permet de se déplacer à cinq ou six, chacun pédalant pour avancer, mais tous pouvant se regarder, être ensemble. Ils passenr sur la jetée en pédalant, en se souriant et en dansant à la fois sur une musique de Stevie Wonder : Isnt’ she lovely !
J’emporte avec moi ce cliché de l’Amérique.
translation: On Sunday, the offshore wind tempers the sun on the San Francisco pier. Families walk around, without worrying about the looks of others. Everyone is looking for their own well-being. The inventive and commercial spirit has made a sort of collective pedal boat which allows five or six people to move around, each pedaling to move forward, but all being able to look at each other, to be together. They pass by the pier, smiling at each other and pedal-dancing to music by Stevie Wonder: Isn’t she lovely!
I take this cliché of America with me.
- Jean-Michel Kantor Clichés de Californie

It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness of the late afternoon of time.
- Jack Kerouac, in On the Road (1962), Ch. 9

L

Sunset greeted them when, after a wide circle to the east and south, they cleared the divide of the Contra Costa hills and began dropping down the long grade that led past Redwood Peak to Fruitvale. Beneath them stretched the flatlands to the bay, checkerboarded into fields and broken by the towns of Elmhurst, San Leandro, and Haywards. The smoke of Oakland filled the western sky with haze and murk, while beyond, across the bay, they could see the first winking lights of San Francisco.
- Jack London, in The Valley of the Moon (1913), book I, chapter XI

M

When you finally cash it in
    Out in Frisco;
And you end this life of sin
    Out in Frisco;
They will gently toll a bell,
Plant your carcass in a dell,
There’s no need to go to hell,
    You’re in Frisco.
- Lisa Mason, The Golden Nineties (1995), ISBN 0-553-57307-1, Epigram

San Francisco is not so much a city as a myth. It is in the United States but not of it. It is so civilized, it would starve to death if it didn't get a salad fork or the right wine. It fancies itself Camelot but comes off more like Cleveland. Its legacy to the world is the quiche. People speak in whole sentences, and polysyllabically. It suffers from a superiority complex.
- Jim Murray, "Montana Was Key to The City," Los Angeles Times (April 25, 1993)

O

There was a guy who testified before the Un-American Activities Committee that it was at the house of Jack and Tillie Olsen that everybody was ordered to throw their party books into the fireplace. The only thing he goofed on was that we never had any fireplace, let alone the fact that it never happened. I was president of the PTA. A neighbor called one morning and said, "Do you have your radio on?" I said, "No." And she said, "Well, you'd better put it on. It's about you." I said, "About me?" So I turned it on fast and heard I was "an agent of Stalin who'd been empowered to take over the San Francisco school system."
- Tillie Olsen Interview with The Progressive Magazine (1999)

If I'm the president of the United States, I walk right into Union Square, I set up my little presidential podium, and I say, "Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead. And if Al-Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead."
- Bill O'Reilly, on The Radio Factor (8 November 2005); also quoted at O'Reilly to San Francisco: "If Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. … You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead" at Media Matters for America (10 November 2005)

P

As many of you know, I come from San Francisco. We don't have a lot of farms there. Well, we do have one — it's a mushroom farm, so you know what that means.
- Nancy Pelosi, to The Agribusiness Club of Washington (24 July 2006).

I realized that my gloss as chief economist, head of Economics and Regional Planning... was part of a sinister system aimed not at outfoxing an unsuspecting customer, but rather at promoting the most subtle and effective form of imperialism the world has ever known.... The march had begun and it was rapidly encircling the planet. The hoods had discarded their leather jackets, dressed up in business suits, and taken on an air of respectability. Men and women were descending from corporate headquarters in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, and Tokyo, streaming across every continent to convince corrupt politicians to allow their countries to be shackled to the corporatocracy, and to induce desperate people to sell their bodies to sweatshops and assembly lines... a world of smoke and mirrors intended to keep us all shackled to a system that is morally repugnant and ultimately self-destructive.
- John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004)p. 160

If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.
- John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas, and sung by Scott McKenzie.

R

Well, the girls are frisky in old 'Frisco, a pretty little chick wherever you go.
- The Ramones, "California Sun"

S

I was appalled that the San Francisco ethic didn't mushroom and envelope the whole world into this loving community of acid freaks. I was very naive.
- Grace Slick, as quoted in The Routledge Dictionary of Quotations (1987) edited by Robert Andrews

A city on hills has it over flat-land places. . . . This gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing, like a picture of a mediaeval Italian city which can never have existed.
- John Steinbeck, in Travels With Charley (1962)

The winds of the Future wait
At the iron walls of her Gate,
And the western ocean breaks in thunder,
And the western stars go slowly under,
And her gaze is ever West
In the dream of her young unrest.
Her sea is a voice that calls,
And her star a voice above,
And her wind a voice on her walls--
My cool, grey city of love.
- George Sterling, "The Cool, Grey City of Love" in The San Francisco Bulletin, vol. 133, no. 31 (11 December 1920), p. 1, Transcribed by Alan Gullette.

At the end of our streets is sunrise;
At the end of our streets are spars;
At the end of our streets is sunset;
At the end of our streets the stars.
- George Sterling, "The City By the Sea – San Francisco", in The San Francisco Bulletin, vol. 135, no. 19 (30 November 1922), p. 14, Transcribed by Alan Gullette

Of all our visitors, I believe I preferred Emperor Norton; the very mention of whose name reminds me I am doing scanty justice to the folks of San Francisco. In what other city would a harmless madman who supposed himself emperor of the two Americas have been so fostered and encouraged? Where else would even the people of the streets have respected the poor soul's illusion? Where else would bankers and merchants have received his visits, cashed his cheques, and submitted to his small assessments? Where else would he have been suffered to attend and address the exhibition days of schools and colleges? Where else, in God's green earth, have taken his pick of restaurants, ransacked the bill of fare, and departed scatheless?
- Robert Louis Stevenson, in The Wrecker (1892)

Z

Say this prayer every night, and if it works, we'll live forever: "Dear Lord, whose mercy's not diminished, let me live till the airport's finished."
- Mike Zelinsky, as quoted in [1] by Herb Caen, in SFGate.com (16 August 1996)

External links

Commons

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

San Francisco, California

Encyclopedic article on San Francisco on Wikipedia
San Francisco travel guide from Wikivoyage

The dictionary definition of San Francisco on Wiktionary