Boston

For other uses, see Boston (disambiguation).

Boston is a great city. ~ Frederick Douglass

Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the Northeastern United States.

Quotes

I have no doubt that Boston will vindicate... ~ Frederick Douglass

Massachusetts has been the wheel within New England, and Boston the wheel within Massachusetts. ~ F. B. Zinckle

• Boston people; with a mission to regenerate the world, Indians especially.
  • Young E. Allison, The Ogallallas: An American Opera (1893)

• And this is good old Boston,
  The home of the bean and the cod.
  Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,
  And the Cabots talk only to God.
  • John Collins Bossidy, a toast given at Holy Cross College alumni dinner in 1910. John McPhee, Giving Good Weight (1979 [1975]), p. 163

• Boston is a great city — and Music Hall has a fame almost as extensive as that of Boston. Nowhere more than here have the principles of human freedom been expounded. But for the circumstances already mentioned, it would seem almost presumption for me to say anything here about those principles. And yet, even here, in Boston, the moral atmosphere is dark and heavy. The principles of human liberty, even I correctly apprehended, find but limited support in this hour a trial. The world moves slowly, and Boston is much like the world. We thought the principle of free speech was an accomplished fact. Here, if nowhere else, we thought the right of the people to assemble and to express their opinion was secure. Dr. Channing had defended the right, Mr. Garrison had practically asserted the right, and Theodore Parker had maintained it with steadiness and fidelity to the last. But here we are today contending for what we thought we gained years ago. The mortifying and disgraceful fact stares us in the face, that though Faneuil Hall and Bunker Hill Monument stand, freedom of speech is struck down. No lengthy detail of facts is needed. They are already notorious; far more so than will be wished ten years hence... Even here in Boston, and among the friends of freedom, we hear two voices: one denouncing the mob that broke up our meeting on Monday as a base and cowardly outrage; and another, deprecating and regretting the holding of such a meeting, by such men, at such a time. We are told that the meeting was ill-timed, and the parties to it unwise... To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money. I have no doubt that Boston will vindicate this right. But in order to do so, there must be no concessions... [U]ntil the right is accorded to the humblest as freely as to the most exalted citizen, the government of Boston is but an empty name, and its freedom a mockery.
  • Frederick Douglass, Plea for Free Speech in Boston (8 June 1880)

• On another occasion, I returned to Boston, where Cell 16 had fulfilled one of my dreams by organizing a forum in historic Fannueil Hall in old Boston. In that hall, Lucy Stone, the Grimké sisters, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, and Frederick Douglass had held antislavery and profeminist meetings during the decades before the Civil War. Their legacy had motivated me to move to Boston to launch female liberation.
  • Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years 1960–1975 (2002)

• Our people are timid, desponding, recreant whimperers. If they fail in their first enterprises they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at the Cambridge Divinity College, and is not ordained within a year afterwards in Boston, or New York, it seems to his friend and himself that he is justified in being disheartened and in complaining for the rest of his life. A sturdy New Hampshire man or Vermonter who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these Boston dolls. My brave Henry here who is content to live now, and feels no shame in not studying any profession, for he does not postpone his life but lives already—pours contempt on these crybabies of routine and Boston. He has not one chance but a hundred chances.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal entry (27 May 1839)

• Boston State-house is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crow-bar.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), VI.

• It's the ultimate Boston transportation. On land there's the Omni, but all those slow cars get in the way. There's public transit – the T — but if you're in good shape, it's usually faster to walk. Bicycles aren't bad. But on water, nothing stops you and there isn't anything important in Boston that isn't within two blocks of being wet. The Harbor and the city are interlocked like wrestling squid, tentacles of water and land snaking off everywhere, slashed with bridges or canals.
  • Neal Stephenson, Zodiac (1988), ch. 4

• Massachusetts has been the wheel within New England, and Boston the wheel within Massachusetts. Boston therefore is often called the "hub of the world," since it has been the source and fountain of the ideas that have reared and made America.
  • Rev. Foster Barham Zincke, Last Winter in the United States (1868)

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1922), pp. 81–82

• A Boston man is the east wind made flesh.
  • Thomas Gold Appleton

• The sea returning day by day
  Restores the world-wide mart.
  So let each dweller on the Bay
  Fold Boston in his heart
  Till these echoes be choked with snows
  Or over the town blue ocean flows.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Boston, Stanza 20.

• One day through the primeval wood
  A calf walked home as good calves should;
  But made a trail all bent askew,
  A crooked trail as all calves do.
  * * * * *
  And men two centuries and a half
  Trod in the footsteps of that calf.
  • Sam Walter Foss, The Calf-Path, an allusion to Boston's crooked streets.

• A hundred thousand men were led
  By one calf near three centuries dead;
  They followed still his crooked way
  And lost a hundred years a day;
  For thus such reverence is lent
  To well-established precedent.
  • Sam Walter Foss, The Calf-Path.

• A solid man of Boston;
  A comfortable man with dividends,
  And the first salmon and the first green peas.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, New England Tragedies, "John Endicott", Act IV.