Jacob K. Javits Quotes

I've always loved New York City and the idea of a cultural exchange: the immigrants coming to America.

We left my birthplace, Brooklyn, New York, in 1939 when I was 13. I enjoyed the ethnic variety and the interesting students in my public school, P.S. 134. The kids in my neighborhood were only competitive in games, although unfriendly gangs tended to define the limits of our neighborhood.

I was born in 1935. But my mother and father - who were immigrants from Ireland - and everybody that I knew growing up in Brooklyn came out of the Depression, and they were remarkable people.

New York City has become a place where it's not easy for the working class to even live.

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

My life growing up was a twisted Bronx version of 'The Color Purple.' It had a much different soundtrack and no trees, but that desperation was the same.

I was 30 when 9/11 happened and I had lived exactly 15 years of life in America, so I was half American. I was a full-fledged New Yorker.

When I was a child, I was living in the housing projects of Philadelphia. I didn't even have a Christmas tree.

I try to remember what it was like to be a kid in New York. I lived in different parts of my childhood in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, where 'When You Reach Me' is set, and also in the Midwood section of Brooklyn.

I'm a big John Steinbeck fan. Cormac McCarthy. I've always loved the stories of regular people. Mark Twain, too. When you look back at some of the epic writers of our country's history, very rarely do you find upper-class royalty. We seem to delve into the struggle of life and the labor of life much more frequently.

American society to me and my brother was thrilling because, first of all, the food made noise. We were so excited about Rice Krispies and Coca-Cola. We had only silent food in our country, and we loved listening to our lunch and breakfast.

I was born on the other side of the tracks, in public housing in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year, and I grew up in a family that lost health insurance. So I was scarred at a young age with understanding what it was like to watch my parents lose access to the American dream.

My parents were born and brought up in New York City. My father was trained as an electrical engineer, and my mother was an elementary school teacher. They were the children of Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States from England and Lithuania in the late 1800s.

I truly believe the art's larger than the artist. Who cares about John Steinbeck? I care about the Joad family.

My earliest recollections are of the teeming East Side where I was born. This Hester Street and its surrounding streets were the most densely populated of any city on Earth; and looking back at it, I realize what I owe to its unique and crowded humanity.

It sounds like something from a Woody Guthrie song, but it's true; I was raised in a freight car.

My grandparents used to tell me stories about their trip to Ellis Island from Russia and life on the Lower East Side of New York.

No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.

I was raised in Brooklyn, and I lived there for 59 years.

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth; I came from really humble beginnings - the projects of New York City - and I worked my way to get to where I am.

A little bit about my family: We didn't really come from much, and we didn't take family trips to California, so my first trip to California was actually my first day of school.

I do not know the needs of a god or of another world.... I do know that women make shirts for seventy cents a dozen in this one.

I have been disgusted to find that those people (immigrants) can live where a decent man would die; they can live on ... food that other men would not touch.

The energy that New York exudes is as much the light of extinguished souls as it is the spark of individual enterprise. And while the full meaning of the city may prove elusive, all New Yorkers are painfully aware that it remains an intractable mass of contradictions. It is not just the extremes of wealth and poverty living side by side.