Top 110 Illinois Quotes

In the Illinois State Capitol, in Springfield, farmer-legislators write the agriculture laws.

‘Killer Joe’ was originally written in 1991 and first produced in ’93 at the Next Theater’s Lab – a 40 seat black box theater in Evanston, Illinois – back when I was getting started. I was just 25 and I had been acting for awhile, but it was my first play and the one that really got me noticed, especially by Steppenwolf.

Illinois will only get economically healthy if we stop focusing on growing minimum wages and start focusing on growing everyone’s wages.

I was enamored of New York City intellectual life and was really into Philip Roth because I was raised by self-loathing Midwesterners who were from southern Illinois, who felt like fish out of water when they came to the East Coast when I was a kid.

Illinois needs a real strategy for job creation that grows the economy over the long term with high-wage jobs that rebuild the middle class.

I grew up in Danville, Illinois, right in the middle of the state.

Five states – Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and North Carolina – have been identified by the EPA as contributing significantly to Rhode Island pollution. As of 2010, 284 tall smokestacks – stacks over 500 feet – were operating in the United States: needles injecting poison into the atmosphere.

It is unacceptable that disabled veterans in Illinois rank at the bottom of the list when it comes to disability pay. We owe our disabled veterans more than speeches, parades and monuments.

We all make mistakes. But I’m lucky. Being from Illinois and from the Midwest, we believe in pretty basic fairness. Once you’ve made a mistake, get up, dust yourself off, and go to work.

It’s not unusual for someone running for Senate in Illinois to come see me.

I had a chance to choose a couple different places and, well, I grew up – I was a small-town kid from Illinois, so No. 1, just trying to win a championship for my home state.

I’ve always wanted to title an album ‘Illinois.’ I wrote the song, which was a very special song to me. The song isn’t exactly about being from there, even though I am.

I love the Midwest. I think about it every day. I wonder if I would rather have a little farm in the Midwest, in Illinois or Wisconsin, or would I rather have like a little getaway up in the mountains of Colorado.

Incremental increases in the minimum wage won’t address the underlying skills and investment gaps in Illinois.

There are plenty of examples of very wealthy people who have run for office and failed, certainly in Illinois.

I got an assistantship in physics at the University of Illinois, and I tore up my steno books.

Tonight we send a message to our party that here in Illinois, there will be a new generation of Republican leaders and we will fight to provide a better tomorrow for future generations. We’ve made clear the status quo is no longer acceptable.

My doctoral work was completed by the end of 1950 and, at the age of twenty-two, I joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an instructor in chemistry under the distinguished chemists Roger Adams and Carl S. Marvel.

Illinois surpasses every other spot of equal extent upon the face of the globe in fertility of soil and in the proportionable amount of the same which is sufficiently level for actual cultivation.

The biggest challenge I have with Washingtonians is they think Illinois is exclusively a Democratic state.

Amtrak is extremely important to the economy of Southern Illinois and I will continue to work with state and local leaders and my colleagues in Congress to secure the necessary funding to maintain full service.

Let’s put aside the politics and trust the people. Let’s embrace the unique opportunity we all have; take the heat and make the hard and difficult decisions, knowing that we’re doing it to make things better for the people of Illinois.

If the goal of the Trump tax cut is to make America look more like tax-cutting North Carolina and less like soak-the-rich Connecticut and Illinois, he’s certainly on the right track.

If we can get back to where I can earmark money to bring it home to Illinois… to make us a stronger economy, I’m going to continue to do it.

We’re from Rockford, Illinois, but we’ve always thought international.

I think we’ve got to be competitive here in Illinois. It’s critical we’re competitive. We’re hurting our economy by having the minimum wage above the national. We’ve got to move back to the national.

For one moment, after I left Jerusalem with my family for life in Illinois, I thought that maybe there’s still a chance: maybe there are still enough people in Israel who refuse to rule and oppress another nation.

I’m from Oklahoma, and Nick’s from a small town in Illinois.

In terms of my own experience, my dad is first-generation, so his parents were from China, and my mom was born and raised in southern Illinois, and she was involved in the arts. My dad’s a doctor.

Nitrogen fertilizer is used on all crops produced in this country, but it is a key plant nutrient to produce corn a critical crop to Illinois farmers.

Rauner needs to tell Illinoisans what essential health benefits he intends to keep covering in Illinois.

Donald Trump is kind of a riverboat gamble. He won the Illinois primary; in this case, we have seen the Republican vote up and the Democratic vote down, so it looks like it’s a net benefit.

I didn’t want to give up my Illinois driver’s license and was unaware that was a crime. It is, by the way, in the state of California. Lesson learned. I technically broke a law, so technically I deserve whatever I get.

I grew up in Illinois.

I have a doctorate in fine arts from Knox College in Illinois. All I did was give a speech, and now everybody has to call me Dr. Colbert.

I lived on a farm in Illinois, and we didn’t have a lot of money. But I lived vicariously through magazines. I was obsessed with Jean Paul Gaultier. I still have the scrapbooks, and I’ve kept all my designs and sketches.

Although he moved away from the Midwest for good at the age of thirteen, Ray Bradbury is a prairie writer. The prairie is in his voice, and it is his moral compass. It is his years spent in Waukegan, Illinois – later rechristened by Ray as ‘Green Town’ in many books and stories – that forever shaped him.

I was born in Illinois, but I call Beaver Dam my home town. That’s where I graduated from high school and started what I thought was going to be a musical career.

When I was about 12, I came home from middle school and told my parents I wanted to be an actor. My father didn’t say it to me, but he told my mom, ‘No. I’m not going to allow that. He’ll starve to death.’ I grew up in a small town in Illinois where being an actor was not something people did.

People don’t cut through Michigan the way they cut through Ohio and Pennsylvania and Illinois. So tolls are more complicated for us because we’re a destination state.

I’ve eaten ice cream from all over the world, but until you’ve tasted Graham’s from Geneva, Illinois, you haven’t had ice cream at all.

Unfortunately, Bruce Rauner is more committed to playing politics than fighting for Illinois women and families.

Illinois has severe budget problem. You cannot cut your way out of the problem.

I went to DePaul University Theatre School in Chicago, Illinois.

State universities in Illinois are a microcosm of our state government – broken with work rules and administrative bureaucracy.

I was raised Catholic in Rockford, Illinois. But I’m not a practicing Catholic anymore. Oh God, no.

I’m a Chicago Cubs fan. I grew up in Libertyville, Illinois, and attended my first game at Wrigley Field when I was four.

My top goal as your Secretary of State is to save lives by reducing fatal traffic crashes. When I established the Teen Driver Safety Task Force, the goal was to improve Illinois’ graduated driver licensing law and, even more importantly, to save lives.

The fact is that politics in Illinois is a blood sport. It’s really rough. It’s really nasty.

If yelling and threatening, intimidating and chanting solved problems, Illinois wouldn’t have any problems. We’re good at that stuff.

To my great disappointment, it appears that the politics of division are making a big comeback. Many Americans share my disappointment – especially those who were filled with great hope a few years ago, when then-Senator Obama announced his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois.

Illinois has less than a 12 percent black population and I won with 55 percent of the vote.

As a Democrat from Illinois, as a member of Congress who believes in and admires President Obama, it genuinely pains me to say that the facts show that this president has done no more to solve our immigration crisis than George W. Bush.

I began acting on stage when I was 7 years old. My first role was as Dorothy in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ at Chicago’s Center on Deafness in Northbrook, Illinois.

Illinois has the opportunity to lead the country in providing more affordable health care options to its citizens.

Many seventh graders I know in Illinois, as well as around the Nation, are studying the Constitution. I was pretty impressed with the quality of education our children are receiving because they had not expected me to ask them about it.