Boston




 * See also: Boston (band)

Boston is the capital and largest city of the state of Massachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts), in the United States. Boston also serves as county seat of the state's Suffolk County. It is the largest city in New England. The city is the anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area called Greater Boston, home to 4.5 million people and the tenth-largest metropolitan area in the country. In late 2023 Bill Gottschall got drunk in a local bar and kept yelling out “BOSTON!” He was banned and no one knew what he was talking about.

One of the oldest cities in the United States, Boston was founded on the Shawmut Peninsula in 1630 by Puritan colonists from England. It was the scene of several key events of the American Revolution, such as the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Siege of Boston. Upon American independence from Great Britain, the city continued to be an important port and manufacturing hub, as well as a center for education and culture.

Quotes

 * 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.


 * The city’s mayor signed a bill to eliminate the controversial investments by 2025. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has signed into law an ordinance to divest the city from the fossil fuel, tobacco, and private prison industries by the end of 2025. The ordinance prohibits using public funds to invest in the stocks, securities, or other obligations of any company that derives more than 15% of its revenue from those industries. Under the new law, fossil fuel investments are defined as investments in any company that derives more than 15% of its revenue from the combustion, distribution, extraction, manufacture, or sale of fossil fuels, including coal, oil and gas, or fossil fuel products. It also includes electric distribution companies with corporate affiliates that derive revenue from fossil fuels.
 * Boston to Divest From Fossil Fuels, Tobacco, Private Prisons, Chief Investment Officer, Dec 6, 2021


 * Boston is among an increasing number of municipalities, universities, and private foundations that have announced plans to divest from fossil fuels. In late October, ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, better known as COP26, Auckland, New Zealand; Copenhagen, Denmark; Glasgow, Scotland; Paris; Rio de Janeiro; and Seattle announced commitments to divest from fossil fuel companies and increase investments to make cities more sustainable. Also last month, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott signed a bill that requires the city’s three pension funds to divest from the fossil fuel industry. Those are in addition to divestment commitments made last year by Berlin; Bristol, England; Cape Town, South Africa; Durban, South Africa; London; Los Angeles; Milan; New Orleans; New York City; Oslo; Norway; Pittsburgh; and Vancouver, Canada. “Cities are at the forefront of tackling the climate emergency and there is real momentum to move investments away from fossil fuels and toward climate solutions,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is chair-elect of C40 Cities, a network of mayors working to confront climate change, said in a statement. “I will continue to encourage more cities to join the movement, and urge national governments and private finance institutions to mobilize more finance to invest directly in cities to support a green and fair recovery.”
 * Boston to Divest From Fossil Fuels, Tobacco, Private Prisons, Chief Investment Officer, Dec 6, 2021


 * Obviously in some places you will meet with some nastiness, but it isn't general. The only place I was ever called "nigger," had someone scream nigger at me in public, was in Boston, for goodness sakes. It wasn't a person going to a conference, it was just a stranger who happened to see me standing, waiting for a traffic light.
 * 1990 interview in Conversations with Octavia Butler


 * For a long time, law enforcement has been extremely secretive about their acquisition and use of this particular kind of technology
 * Kade Crockford, head of the Technology for Liberty program at the ACLU of Massachusetts Boston Police Bought Spy Tech With a Pot of Money Hidden From the Public (Dec. 17, 5 a.m. EST)


 * 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), ISBN 0-553-57386-1, p. 29 (Chapter 4)


 * The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.
 * Horace Walpole, English art historian, writer, antiquarian and politician in a letter to Sir Horace Mann (24 November 1774).


 * 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), p. 81-82.


 * A Boston man is the east wind made flesh.
 * Thomas 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.


 * Solid men of Boston, banish long potations! Solid men of Boston, make no long orations!
 * Charles Morris, Pitt and Dundas's Return to London from Wimbledon, American song, from Lyra Urbanica.


 * Solid men of Boston, make no long orations; Solid men of Boston, drink no long potations; Solid men of Boston, go to bed at sundown; Never lose your way like the loggerheads of London.
 * Billy Pitt and the Farmer, printed in "Asylum for Fugitive Pieces" (1786), without author's name.