11 Quotes by Jerry Herron

Everybody in those days was a foreigner, no matter where they were born; as industrial modernization had its way with people and places, no one was native to the transformation of the United States from an agricultural economy to the foremost industrial power in the world--the factory being both the cause and the effect of an act of becoming, the likes of which nobody had ever seen before.

Detroit is just like everywhere else, only more so--a lot more so.

[S]tart at the turn of the last century, in 1901, with the celebration of Detroit’s bicentennial. That was the Detroit that came before--before all the racket that attended the making of the modern world, which happened here first and faster than anywhere else on this planet.

I'd love to see the city market its car culture, our automotive heritage. We invented the modern industrial world. We're still Motor City.

But what people don't realize is that Detroit is the greatest success story in American history.

The Super Bowl is over, Hurricane Katrina is finished, there are no hurricanes brewing in the Gulf. This will be big until the next big event.

Detroit's the city everybody likes to look at as a place that's dangerous, abandoned and economically no longer viable. It's the most famous failed city in the United States.

This is an interesting place with its own distinctive culture. It's not Chicago, it's not New York, it's Detroit--and you've got to like it for that.

Americans don't like poverty. Americans don't like things old. Americans don't like urban violence. We have all the problems everyone else has that people like to pretend exist only in Detroit.