15 Famous (and Infamous) Quotes about Providence and Rhode Island

1.

”I’ve been in Rhode Island a lot…Man, Rhode Island's a good place. It's a really good place." - Taylor Swift (Music superstar and part time Rhode Island resident).

2.

“I’m from Connecticut and we don’t have any dialects. Well, I don’t think we have any dialects, and yeah, it’s a very complex. That Rhode Island - Masschusetts New England region is arguably the hardest dialect to nail.”

- Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, The Cleveland Show and American Dad

3.

“Growing up in Rhode Island, my friends would have strung me up if I had been a Yankees fan.” - Charlie Day, actor, "Mean Bosses" and "It's Always Sunny In Philadephia."

4.

“Political corruption is to Rhode Islanders as smog is to people who live in Los Angeles: nobody complains of its absence, but when it rolls around everyone feels right at home.” -  Philip Gourevitch, “The New Yorker”

5.

“Like a bunch of renegade pilgrims/
Who are thrown out of Plymouth colony.
We're Rhode Island bound!
Or like a group of College Freshmen/
who were rejected by Harvard and forced to go to Brown.
We're Rhode Island Bound! - "The Rhode To Rhode Island"- Family Guy

6.

“I miss coffee milk, I miss Caserta’s Pizza, Twin Oaks. I mean, they got the best food in Rhode Island”- Paul “Pauly D” DelVecchio, of “Jersey Shore” on “The Rhode Show”

7.

“And you, you come from RI, and little old RI is famous for you.” “Rhode Island is Famous For You” - from Broadway Musical Revue “Inside USA”, written by Arthur Schwartz & Howard Dietz. recorded by Blossom Dearie, appropriated by Buddy Cianci for his radio theme song.

8.

”One hundred years after the declaration that all men are created equal, there began to gather in Newport a colony of the rich, determined to show that some Americans were conspicuously more equal than others.” - Alistair Cooke,  journalist, television personality and broadcaster

9.

“There's a very small country in the West Indies. I mean small. It's terribly small, tiny little country. Rhode Island could beat the crap out of it in a war. THAT'S how small it is.” - Dudley Moore's character Arthur Bach in "Arthur".

10.

"Look at the way it cringes there, occupying a sliver of land so inconsequential that the names of its cities and towns have to be entered vertically on the map. It is foolish for something so microscopic to go around posing as a state. Anyone who has ever been there knows what I mean. You drive into Rhode Island, nod off for 10 or 20 minutes or embark on an interesting conversation and—zap—you're in Massachusetts. You're out of the place before you can settle into it. Flying over Little Rhody is absurdity itself; you can traverse it in the middle of a sentence." - Smithsonian Magazine, "Good-bye, Rhode Island," by Donald Dale Jackson, January 2000.

11.

“Newport, Rhode Island, that breeding place--that stud farm, so to speak--of aristocracy; aristocracy of the American type.”
- Mark Twain's Autobiography

12.

"She came from Providence, 
the one in Rhode Island 
Where the old world shadows hang 
heavy in the air 
She packed her hopes and dreams 
like a refugee 
Just as her father came across the sea "- The Eagles, "The Last Resort"

13.

"Well I'm on the Downeaster "Alexa"
And I'm cruising through Block Island Sound,
I have charted a course to the Vineyard
But tonight I am Nantucket bound." Billy Joel - "The Downeaster Alexa"

14.

“A new survey shows that the state with the most marijuana use is Rhode Island. Which explains Rhode Island’s official state motto, ‘But if it’s an island, where does the road go?”- Saturday Night Live “Weekend Update” 1/17/2015

15.

“I went to graduate school at NYU, I had to study how to speak for 3 years and it was intense. I moved to Rhode Island when i was young...you know, 'you goin’ to the Warwick Mall?'” (in RI accent) - Actress Debra Messing on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon