Herb Caen Quotes

The world of Manhattan is small and tightly knit, and the man on top retains a certain humility. He knows how far and fast he can fall by looking at the guy across the street. The view from the $250,000 apartment covers a lot of ground, most of it condemned.

- Herb Caen

Just two days in Manhattan and you find yourself looking for a place to wash your handkerchief after you wipe your forehead and it comes away black. Is there a dirtier or more fascinating city anywhere in the land? The answer to both parts of the question has to be positively negative.

- Herb Caen

A man begins cutting his wisdom teeth the first time he bites off more than he can chew.

- Herb Caen

A city is a state - of mind, of taste, of opportunity. A city is a marketplace - where ideas are traded, opinions clash and eternal conflict may produce eternal truths.

- Herb Caen

A city is where you can sign a petition, boo the chief justice, fish off a pier, gaze at a hippopotamus, buy a flower at the corner, or get a good hamburger or a bad girl at 4 A.M. A city is where sirens make white streaks of sound in the sky and foghorns speak in dark grays. San Francisco is such a city.

- Herb Caen

A city is a crazy concrete jungle whose people at the end of each day somehow make a small step ahead against terrible odds.

- Herb Caen

A good column is one that sells paper. It doesn't matter how beautifully it is written and how much you admire the author... if it doesn't sell any papers, it's not a good column. It's a terrible yardstick to use, but in the newspaper business, that's the whole thing.

- Herb Caen

Cockroaches and socialites are the only things that can stay up all night and eat anything.

- Herb Caen

Americans are pragmatic, relatively uncomplicated, hearty and given to broad humor.

- Herb Caen

New Yorkers are stuck in a gloomy mucilage of mutual commiseration.

- Herb Caen

The only thing wrong with immortality is that it tends to go on forever.

- Herb Caen

Satire of satire tends to be self-canceling, and deliberate shock tactics soon lose their ability to shock, especially when they're too deliberate.

- Herb Caen

I have a memory like an elephant. I remember every elephant I've ever met.

- Herb Caen

A city is not gauged by its length and width, but by the broadness of its vision and the height of its dreams.

- Herb Caen

San Franciscans have a bond of self-satisfaction bordering on smugness.

- Herb Caen

The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.

- Herb Caen

I hope I go to Heaven, and when I do, I'm going to do what every San Franciscan does when he gets there. He looks around and says, 'It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco.'

- Herb Caen

Logic is no answer to passion.

- Herb Caen

Philosophically, I don't like doing commercials.

- Herb Caen

When a place advertises itself as 'World Famous,' you may be sure it isn't.

- Herb Caen

Old San Francisco - the one so many nostalgics yearn for - had buildings that related well to each other.

- Herb Caen

The only way to fight a thing like 50 is to stay au courant if it kills you.

- Herb Caen

I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there.

- Herb Caen