San Quotations

The San Gabriel Mountains rise like a rampart at the edge of the city, safeguarding more than 500,000 acres of mature forests, mountain streams, dramatic waterfalls, and towering peaks that reach over 9,000 feet. These untamed places attract bighorn sheep, mountain lions, and other threatened or endangered species.

The bridge to Coronado Island off San Diego was built because the mob had a hotel there and needed a way to get people out there.

Forty-five years ago, when I was 18, I came to San Francisco by boat and took two weeks to get here. I had a great impression. I think San Francisco is the welcoming gate for people from Asia.

As a child growing up in San Francisco in the 1950s, I sometimes met insults when I ventured outside of Chinatown or my neighborhood. I have even been spat on and threatened with a knife. I could have let my anger fester until it became hate. However, I realized they were isolated incidents, and I simply got on with my life.

I have chosen to seek election to the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors and not reelection to Congress.

My family is Chilean, and I was born there. By the time I was four, we were living in San Antonio, Texas, and I just remember picking a blue bonnet and getting yelled at by some guy with a sheriff hat and a badge. I was traumatized. He told me it was the state flower, and I wasn't supposed to be messin' with it.

In 2004, results from a study that I worked on with colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, linked chronic stress to shortening of telomeres.

When I first played '1234' it was on stage in San Francisco at some kind of, like, sticky-floored club. And it felt like a punk song. I mean it's ridiculous to say that now, but it had that kind of, like, piercing straight melody. And then this fist-pumping ending, you know that pa-dap-pada.

In the late 1960s, Ontario Airport was a throwback to a bygone era. Located 35 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, the airport served only two carriers, Western and Bonanza. Passengers could catch regional flights to San Francisco, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Palm Springs, Phoenix and Los Angeles, and that was about it.

Like I'm in San Diego today and this is my hometown so I've got a lot of my friends coming and I definitely want to put on the best show that I can.

When I was in the gunner's bubble of a B25 bomber, taking off from an aircraft carrier 100 miles off the coast of San Diego, I remember saying to myself how amazing it was to get the chance to do that.

After graduating college in 2001 with a B. A. in Political Science and Speech Communications from Texas State University - San Marcos, I realized that my generation and those younger had been given no future and had been maliciously robbed of the knowledge of principles and methods necessary for building one.

We opened the first Men's Wearhouse in Houston in August 1973, then a store a year for 10 years in Texas. In the early 1980s I opened a store in the San Francisco Bay Area. Within the year, the Texas economy was in total disarray. We were facing Chapter 11, and if not for the California store, we might not have survived.

As a child, we visited the San Juan Islands during the summer. Kayaking, big family meals, playing on the beach - great memories!

I lived in San Pedro, California, which is, you know, on the west side of California, and it's where many, many Japanese lived.

My very first role was with James Earl Jones on 'Gabriel's Fire' on TV. He drove a Chevy Citation, which is the exact same car that I bought from a guy in San Francisco called Sandy Boone. I showed up on set, and James Earl Jones was driving the car I had bought from Sandy for $250.

I've always liked and appreciated storytellers like Garry Shandling and Bill Cosby - more long-form comedy. So starting in San Francisco, watching all these great comics - Patton Oswalt, Dave Chappelle - you get to see them a bunch, and you go, 'Wow, this is where I need to be.'

When I was 13, I began relaxing my hair, and that meant when I turned 18 it began to crack and fall off, and when I began anchoring, I had short, stubbly pieces of hair. And trying to report in San Francisco with fog meant my hair swelled.

I had an apartment on Long Beach Blvd and San Vicente in Long Beach, California. That was the apartment I done 'Regulate' in. I had all my equipment set up in the bedroom, a vocal booth in the bathroom and in the closet, and that's where we created it. I had an MPC 60, a Numark mixer, and a Technics 1200, and a ton of records.

I don't think I have a demographic. I was at Comic-Con in San Diego recently, and I was doing a signing, and my line was all military guys, young girls, housewives and guys in wheelchairs. There was just everybody all over the place.

Growing up in San Diego, I can remember going with my brother to see bands like Pennywise and NOFX - good punk bands that were fast and tight.

I used to go to San Diego all the time to hang out. My cousin played for the San Diego Padres, and my brother lives down there. I love going to the zoo and walking around Old Town.

Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble? I don't think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake.

To have internal peace and stability and economic development, it is important to have good relations with the political parties that we have in our country. That is why we have had engagement with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

In San Paulo I went to the movies and by the time I left the theater there was a mob at the exit. I had never been in that kind of situation when we weren't on tour and there was a whole bunch of security. I'm a little dude, and out of nowhere to have 50 or 60 people come running towards me when I'm jut with my friend, it was kind of scary.

When I went to San Francisco for the first time in 1975, I went there for a summer, this acting training program for three months in the summer - I've never been the same.

People ask me if I ever get sick of playing 'Daydream Believer' or whatever. But I don't look at it that way. Do they ask if Tony Bennett is tired of 'I Left My Heart in San Francisco?'

We opened Panda Inn on June 8, 1973. The whole family - my parents, a brother and sister - all worked at the restaurant for free. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment in San Gabriel and didn't have any money.

I've always had a connection here in the city from the first day I arrived. I stayed in the city. I made San Francisco my home. I was seen in the offseason at a lot of different functions, and people liked that.

When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco.

To me, everything outside of Los Angeles is the 'south,' including places like San Diego. It's sort of like the saying, 'Everything is God.' Indeed it is.

I grew up not liking coffee, even though I'm from Brazil. Then I realized when I moved to San Francisco that it's not that I don't like coffee, I just didn't like the coffee I'd had before. I fell in love with my morning cup of coffee, and my second one at 11 A.M., and so on and so forth.

This is one Hart that you will not leave in San Francisco.

Comic-Con is incredibly important to San Diego, but that doesn't mean we can't poke a little fun at it!

I grew up in Vancouver, which is a pretty liberal, gay Mecca of the West coast. There's San Francisco, and then there's Vancouver.

I just went to your typical public schools, and my dad would take us to the movies every week, or he'd buy scalped tickets to San Antonio Spurs games. I remember I was four or five years old and my parents, who were very young, took us to see The Police in Austin, and Iggy Pop opened.

I thought art was dead rabbits hanging by their feet on a wall. I went to Italy and saw all the religious paintings, and they didn't move me all that much. Then someone invited me to see this van Gogh exhibit at the Rosenberg Gallery in San Francisco.

Basic SEAL training is six months of long, torturous runs in the soft sand, midnight swims in the cold water off San Diego, obstacles courses, unending calisthenics, days without sleep and always being cold, wet and miserable.

I had talked for years about doing a restaurant with Rocky Dudum, who's been my friend since I first came to San Francisco. Then Rocky's son, Jeff, said he wanted to design it, so he traveled around the country to sports restaurants like Mickey Mantle's and Michael Jordan's, and he came up with a great concept.

Belize has a tropical climate and is quite affordable and is developing a reputation as an inexpensive Hawaii. If you want to hide away someplace that is extremely low-key, Placencia is perfect. San Pedro is more touristy and modernized.

I was born in San Francisco. I was raised in Oakland, so I'm, like, super Bay Area born, and, you know, it's just really multicultural up there, and there's a lot of subcultures just from, like, anything, like from rockabilly to, like, crazy punk scenes to, you know, a huge rap scene, and there's just all kinds of things you can do out there.

When I was in my late 30s, I lit a figure on fire on Baker Beach in San Francisco. It was me, a friend, and maybe eight people, tops. There wasn't any premeditation to it at all. It was really just a product of San Franciscan bohemian milieu.

I almost threw up the first time I set foot inside the University of California, San Francisco's Comprehensive Care Center and joined the stream of thin, slow-moving, low-voiced, gray-skinned people. I didn't want to be one of the pitied, the struck-down.

The reason I'm in San Diego is not because I want distance from South Africa but because I want proximity to the people I love. But I don't envy growing up in America. As ugly as aspects of it were, my biggest blessing was to be born a South African.

This one, even though it called for San Francisco, I think they wanted to initially shoot part of the film up here, you know get the exteriors and then go back to L.A. We really fought to get it up here and I think Paramount was really pleased.

Here are also the two vessels, but the San Carlos without sailors, all having died of the scurvy, except two.

When I first came into the league, I was with Tim Dwight in San Diego, and a guy named Eric Parker, who really showed me the work ethic it takes to be an NFL receiver, and I've really tried to keep that with me.

Within a few weeks the organization for the maintenance of international peace and security, established by the San Francisco Charter, will be formally launched through the convocation of the first General Assembly of the United Nations.

I was born in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1948 but grew up in a black neighborhood. During elementary and middle school, I commuted to a bilingual school in Chinatown. So I did not confront white American culture until high school.

San Francisco is one of my favorite cities in the world.

I was in Tower Records in San Francisco a few weeks ago, buying some cassettes, and a couple of people recognized me and ran up with albums, and I just wanted to cover my face and have a seizure or something. I want people to just go away.

When you work with web design companies in San Francisco, you end up with a bunch of twenty-somethings who have their own cultural peculiarities, including obscurity for its own sake. You give those guys a website for a banking institution and they screw it up, because they are designing for themselves.

My father worked in high-energy nuclear physics, and my mother was a mycologist and a geneticist. After both parents completed postdoctoral fellowships in San Diego in 1962, my father took a faculty position in the Physics Department at Yale, and so the family moved to New Haven, Connecticut.

A small-time hoodlum who had spent most of the 1960s at San Quentin State Prison in California, the 30-year-old Bryant claimed that he hijacked Flight 97 under orders from his higher-ups in the Black Panther Party; he said his mission was to arrange for the purchase of bazookas to aid the organization's struggle against oppression.

I like the idea that you can paint something outdoors, and anyone can see it. It's open to anyone, and people have to deal with it. In the gallery, it's the same 150 people on the San Francisco art scene. There's a dynamic on the street that's definitely more interesting.

I always have my journal with me. It was handmade by a guy at the San Telmo market in Buenos Aires. If you go there he can make you one. It's leather and bronze and I'm able to replace the paper when it runs out. It has a lion on the cover that I say is there to protect my thoughts.

In 1973, I was offered a professorship at the University of California, San Diego. Although I was certainly not unhappy at Nottingham, I had been there over twenty years from starting undergraduate studies to Professor of Applied Statistics and Econometrics, and I thought that a change of scene was worth considering.

But some people will say you just did these programs. Well, yes, the programs are important and I'm proud of the programs, but mostly I'm proud of the way the San Francisco Symphony plays these programs.

Coming from my bedroom in San Antonio to this big world and going from singing covers off my laptop to making music in this nice studio, making professional-sounding music - it's just weird.

In the summer of 2009, in the wake of a crisis in her life, my mother moved from San Diego to San Francisco to live with my 16-year-old daughter and me. My mother was 77. I was 51. Despite a chorus of skepticism from friends - who knew about my upbringing - I was determined to do what I could to help my mother.

After college, I went to San Francisco and worked as a secretary in a reinsurance company. That was a pretty dismal job. It was a real small place. Guys would come in, and they'd sort of stick out their arms like wings so I could take their coats off. They'd tell me, 'Two,' and I'd put two lumps of sugar in their coffee.

According to 'Star Trek' mythos, Starfleet Command - operational headquarters for a flotilla of craft that keep the cosmic peace - is located in San Francisco's Presidio, in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge (still carrying traffic, even in the 23rd century).

My family came over from Spain about nine generations ago. I was born in San Diego, but by the time I was four days old, I was on a flight back to Spain because that's where my family was living at the time.

In January 2013, I told the people in the Justice Department after the re-election that I wanted to focus on reforming the federal criminal justice system. I made an announcement in August of that year in San Francisco, when we rolled out the Smart on Crime initiative.

I was born in San Bernardino in summer of '91 and grew up in Riverside, San Bernardino, and Victorville.

At the suggestion of Professor Itaru Watanabe, and with his help, I left Japan at the age of twenty-three to pursue graduate study at the University of California at San Diego.

I wish the city of San Francisco, bastion of liberalism, were more innovative when it comes to how to spread the wealth.

I think California has some very good looking women... I know Stephanie Seymour is from San Diego, and I know Josie Maran - who's my very good friend - she's from Northern California. So I think California produces some good looking women, for sure.

I find this proposed amendment very, very, very, very shocking. And immoral. And, you know, if civil disobedience is the way to go about change, then I think a lot of people will be going to San Francisco.

My mother was actually born in Ohio but raised in West Virginia where her family had a laundry. She has a West Virginian accent. My father was born in China, but he's the son of an American citizen. My paternal grandfather was born in San Francisco in 1867.

Back in 1990, there were fewer than 20 wineries in and around Paso Robles, a farming community midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Most of the wines produced there were rustic, highly tannic and alcoholic, with little charm or finesse.

When I work in San Francisco doing stand-up, I usually schedule it for July, and we'll drive up the coast and camp in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Big Sur, and we'll just camp our way up the coast, and then we'll get to San Francisco and hang out there for four days.

The single outstanding exception was the broad yet precise mandate communicated by the General Assembly in 1946 to prepare as soon as possible the Charter of Human Rights which the San Francisco Conference had not had the time or the courage to draw up.

McDermott and two colleagues - James H. Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard University - published a paper titled 'Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too.' Their study shows that divorce can spread like a virus among friends, siblings and co-workers.

Two days a week, I go to my office at The Grotto, a writer's collective in San Francisco. I get there at 8:15 and write until around 1 or 2 P.M.

It just so happens that I was born and raised in Washington. Had I been born in Chicago or San Antonio, the streets and places would have figured into whatever I wrote. Just so happens that it's Washington, D.C.

It's weird, when I go back to San Francisco, the few times that I've done shows there since leaving, it still feels like I live there. It's very, very strange for me. That's where my daughter was born, at UCSF. I have this huge attachment to San Francisco. It's like a love affair.

When I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State after Grinnell, I joined the moribund remnants of the Actor's Workshop, until I saw Kay Hayward and Sandy Archer in the San Francisco Mime Troupe and drove down that day to audition. The rest is history.

I'm Asian-American, and I was the only Chinese girl growing up in a white school in San Diego. So I understood what it was like to be different, to always want to fit in and never feel like you ever could.

My mom was born in San Diego, around Vista. So we've always been California people.

I think at the end of the day, even though I didn't win a Super Bowl ring, I felt like I backed them up for drafting me. I backed up the San Diego Chargers for picking me with the fifth pick.

We tend to become social core groups, whatever our similar interest and background where we came through. It tends to be a filter through which people see themselves. It can be all different ethnicities. They can see themselves as San Franciscans, or Warriors fans. You want to build a tribe of viral advocates for that team.

I wanted to be a classical actress. I plodded along. I went to junior college in San Francisco, I was in a Repertory Company. My hero was Eva Le Gallienne, who was a great theater actress at the turn of the century who created her own company, and she wrote these hilarious autobiographies at the time.

I don't know about the time those songs were written. But he was jamming with someone in Colorado or San Francisco, and I'm sure he was working on the lyrics right up to the show because they were really relevant for the situation.

For people who know both New York and the Bay Area, it is a complement to say that Oakland is San Francisco's Brooklyn. It's a complement both to Oakland and to Brooklyn. And, if you look at Brooklyn, Brooklyn is hot; Brooklyn is cool.

For every family in liberal San Francisco that went solar with SunRun in 2010, nearly eight families in more conservative Fresno made the switch to our solar power service.

To me... San Francisco is an ideal city, intellectually stimulating and naturally beautiful. The oceans and forests are close enough to refresh the spirit; the architecture is always exciting.

The misconception about Foursquare is that it's just hipsters in New York and San Francisco checking in at bars. It's happening all over the world. I've seen huge growth in Europe, Japan, South America.

All through my twenties, I lived in very walkable cities - Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York.

I was part of a writers' collective with 21 writers and filmmakers called the San Francisco Writers' Grotto. We had our own office space in this old converted dog and cat hospital, and we had a basketball hoop outside. I'd bring my dog to work every day and write.

Parallels between classical and pop are not new. The whole San Francisco movement of John Cage and Terry Riley went hand in glove with what the Velvet Underground were doing.

Maui reminded me of San Diego: beautiful, but crowded.

San Francisco is a city of twenty-something millionaire white kids named Doug.

Making ribs in Texas isn't that unusual a choice for 'Top Chef'. We played the stereotypes everywhere we go. It's not only in Texas. We do it in New York; we did it in San Francisco. Listen if we shoot it in Seattle you know we're going to be throwing salmon somewhere.

I went to school at the San Francisco Art Institute, thinking I was going to become an art teacher. Within the first six months I was there, I was told that I couldn't be an art teacher unless I became an artist first.

If we don't preserve the natural resources, you aren't going to have a sustainable society. This is not something for Chez Panisse and the elite of San Francisco. It's for everyone.

If we could do high-speed rail in California just half a notch above what they've done on the Shanghai line in China, and if we had a straight path from L.A. to San Francisco, as well as the milk run, at least that would be progress.

I did 'Quigley Down Under,' which is quite deliberately placed in Australia, which is a Tom Selleck, Alan Rickman, Laura San Giacomo film from '88, I want to say.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

We've all worked together at one time or another. We all respect each other. Any one of us can do the job as sheriff of San Joaquin County.