Quotes About California

A federal bailout would spare California from having to make spending cuts needed to bring its budget into balance. The matter has become urgent since California voters rejected several tax-hiking ballot initiatives. Rather than taking the vote as a signal to dramatically curtail spending, the state turned to the feds. If they get a free pass, the politicians can avoid fixing any of their past mistakes or preparing California for the future.

Thunderstorms were rare in California, but when they came they were, like most things in California, larger than life.

California ... is the place that sets the trends and establishes the values for the rest of the country; like a slow ooze, California culture spreads eastward across the land.

When I lived in California, 1984 to '87, it was a Republican state. Sacramento where I lived was 73% Democrat voter registration, when I got there. It was in the sixties when I left. We had amazing success in converting Democrats in Sacramento. But Pete Wilson, Ronald Reagan, all people elected governors and so forth, it's only been with the advent of the 1986 immigration bill that we lost California, if I might say, and now it's just gone so far left they're seriously talking about seceding.

Many of the people I work with I've worked with in other lifetimes. I moved to California because I knew that many of my students from past lives were in California.

You know, something like 90 people who have now filed to run for governor in this recall election. They say there could be as many as 200 people on the ballot. You know, it's really easy to run here in California. All you need is like a couple of signatures, not many, thirty-five hundred bucks, you're on the ballot, like that. I mean, what does it say about California? We have stricter requirements to get on 'American Idol' than we do to run for governor.

California has gone insane. According to the latest poll, Arnold Schwarzenegger is leading in California's governor's race by 34 points. You can tell that Governor Gray Davis is worried because he spent all day yesterday working on his pecs.

I was introduced to skateboarding through my father. He was a surfer back in the 50's & 60's in Hawaii, where my parents grew up. They later moved to California and I was born. Skateboarding was the thing for surfers here in California in the 60's and my Dad immediately made me a homemade board.

And it's California, where everything is powerfully strange. Everyone wants it to be home. Everyone left where he or she was from with dreams of transformation. Everyone runs away to California at least once, or at least all the lonely, hungry people do.

I was raised with the Bible Belt mentality, and by coming to California, I came out of this dark place and unlearned a lot of things I'd been taught.

Baseball has always been slow to accept change. Only through dire pressure can any radical change be accomplished. The move of the Giants and Dodgers from New York to California brought that pressure in abundance.

When abused children under court protection were studied in California and Massachusetts, it turned out that a disproportionate number of them were unattractive...abused kids had head and face proportions that made them look less infantile and cute.

Bodybuilders party a lot, and once, in Gold’s - the gym in Venice, California, where all the top guys train - there was a black girl who came out naked. Everybody jumped on her and took her upstairs, where we all got together.

On another level, I want to mention that I have a strong Jewish identity and - over the years - have been involved in several Jewish projects, such as the establishment of a strong program of Judaic Studies at the University of California in San Diego.

One thing that improved my cooking skills was being a poor student in California... If you don't have much money, you have to learn to cook.

You could have a hit in California that no one had heard of in Oklahoma.

When they were putting oil rigs up and down the California coast, the whole issue of safe energy and the addiction to fossil fuels really came into focus.

I grew up in Louisiana and I think people get it confused. They assume that I lived in California or that's where I'm from. I worked there, but I didn't live there.

Los Angeles was an impression of failure, of disappointment, of despair, and of oddly makeshift lives. This is California? I thought.

California produces 40% of America's fresh fruits, vegetables and nuts - the kind you eat. We have had a bumper crop of the other variety, too.

A story of remarkable simplicity and charm. A young swimmer invites us into sea off the coast of California where through her eyes we see an entire realm of creatures we have never known so intimately before. Truly for people of all ages, Lynne Cox's adventure with the baby whale, Grayson, becomes a parable and an experience, thanks not only to the author's great and generous spirit, but through her immense gift for describing nature.

I did meet Mickey Mouse in California, and he seems to be writing the Labour party's economic policy at the moment.

When I was at the University of California at Berkeley, I went to some classes that must have had more than four hundred students in them. I almost always sat in the far back of the auditorium so I could read the newspaper. I remember that I stayed late one day to ask the professor a question, and when I got up to him, all I could think to myself was, 'So this is what the professor looks like.

[Lennie meets Joe - he works out that she was named after John Lennon] I nod. "Mom was a hippie." This is northern Northern California after all - the final frontier of freakerdom. Just in the eleventh grade we have a girl named Electricity, a guy named Magic Bus, and countless flowers: Tulip, Begonia, and Poppy - all parent-given-on-the-birth-certificate names. Tulip is a two-ton bruiser of a guy who would be the star of out football team if we were the kind of school that has optional morning meditation in the gym

The problem is sitting in the birthplace of Islam, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, where this interpretation of Islam has gone out into the world over the last four decades, creating militancy groups from Indonesia, to now, San Bernardino, California, vicious attack. We have to take back the faith. And we have to take it back with the principles of peace, social justice, and human rights, women's rights, and secularize governance.

Year after year, author/historian William Loren Katz continues to mine the lodestone of Black culture, and it is simply amazing how often he manages to find new treasures. Here, with the same insight he brought to Black Indians and his other books, the author traces the courageous role of Black women in settling the West. He deftly shows how these pioneering spirits helped stabilize early communities in Texas, Oklahoma, California and elsewhere.

I always enjoyed art history because, growing up in California, my exposure was limited, and it was a new experience. To learn the history of art opened up certain things to me, made me see. It intrigued me.

Using virtual world, a scientist in Japan can conduct an experiment using a special facility in California, watching the entire thing via a live stream - and possibly controlling the experimental equipment remotely. We can use that same kind of technology to control a robot on Mars.

I'm from California, I know what's up with this. You keep raising people's taxes eventually they are going to say no.

The debt ceiling at some point has to be raised. I don't think there's anybody that questions the fact that if we ended up getting in a situation where the U.S. government was sending out IOUs like the state of California did at one point, that ends up creating quite a brand problem for our country.

But these days, there's also a strong economic argument for doing away with capital punishment. With California facing its most severe fiscal crisis in recent memory... it would be crazy not to consider the fact that it will add as much as $1 billion over the next five years simply to keep the death penalty on the books.

[Jerry Brown] is California's way of celebrating the Year of the Child.

California must be all American or all Chinese. We are resolved that it shall be American, and are prepared to make it so. May we not rely upon your sympathy and assistance?

I went to the University of California, Santa Cruz for a year, which turned out to be a really vibrant, very intensive intellectual atmosphere where you could do a lot of aspect of music without it being a conservatory. And that's why I went there.

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.

On 'Justified,' we're driving all around Southern California trying to find a location that we can call Kentucky.

I hear the weed is really strong in California.

I move between San Francisco and Paris... I have a wonderful beach house in California.

California is choosing between the lesser of, uh, 300 evils.

I designed furniture that pulled apart, folded, and broke down into neat stacks. Since arriving in California, I had moved four times and it looked as if I would move again. Was it the land running under my feet or my feet running over the land?

I left Chicago many years ago to move to California. You can't help but live a healthy lifestyle here if you want to fit in. I find myself eating chicken and salad and chicken and salad and salad and chicken, like a monk.

I was born in Orange, California and I grew up in Huntington Beach. I started skateboarding when I was five and continued to do so off and on over the years.

And we need a full affront on an energy crisis that is real in California and looms for other parts of our country if we don't move quickly.

On my recent trip to the Mexico border, Border Patrol agents in California told me they have arrested the same coyotes 20 times, but they are not prosecuted.

I like to go for a little drive up the California coast.

I don't remember reading much at all during the writing of Eileen. I go through several years-long dry spells and I don't feel like reading at all. I was working part-time for a guy in Venice, California while I drafted Eileen. He wanted help in writing his memoir. The research had a lot to do with the 60s, so that must have informed my sense of the place and time in my novel, and perhaps even the memoir point-of-view. He was also from New England. It was a fun job. I learned a lot about motorcycle clubs, Charles Manson, hopping freight trains.

Los Angeles makes the rest of California seem authentic.

I think if you come out to California trying to be an actor, it's pretty hard. There's desperation. A lot of people are desperate, and a lot of people are clueless, including me. It's hard to try to figure it out. I've never told you, but I have head shots that if you saw them... they're so terrible! It's so embarrassing.