Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You know, Southerners are pretty cool.
Southerners can never resist a losing cause.
Southerners smile more than other Americans.
I came from a big family... a big family of Southerners.
I certainly think that Southerners are tough, and I take pride in that.
Southerners are also like ethnic groups in that they have a sense of group identity.
I do play a lot of Southerners because I grew up in the South, but they're still diverse.
For generations, even many otherwise decent white Southerners learned to despise black people.
I think we Southerners have talked a fair amount of malarkey about the mystique of being Southern.
Southerners pride themselves on being polite. This is why we always use euphemisms to express ourselves.
Southerners have this love of embellishment. Even when you read a police report, there's some backstory.
Southerners have never been afraid of seasoning. It's kind of the other way around; our seasoning is afraid of us.
There is racism all over the United States. Most Southerners I know, we definitely find ourselves defending our heritage.
Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.
To Southerners like my mother, 'Gone With the Wind' was not just a book; it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance.
Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
If you care to define the South as a poor, rural region with lousy race relations, that South survives only in geographical shreds and patches and most Southerners don't live there any more.
White Southerners created an entire cosmetics industry equating beauty with whiteness and trained a string of winning Miss Americas who embodied their racial ideal in a national representative.
My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late '50s and early '60s. As a result, he and my mother - both native southerners - were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust.
I would have to say my favorite thing about hosting 'Redneck Island 4' was the cast. They were the most genuine, fun, and down-to-earth Southerners. They just reminded me of the kids I went to school with.
All the Southerners think we're Yanks, and all the Yanks think we're Southerners, and all the Midwesterners think we're East. Everybody's always wrong about Louisville. That's kind of why I love it so much.
I had in mind a message, although I hope it doesn't intrude too badly, persuading Americans, and especially Southerners, of the critical importance of land and our vanishing natural environment and wildlife.
Even for southerners, Arkansans are amazingly friendly and extend hospitality to all strangers with astonishing openness. You couldn't find a pretension in that state if you hunted from Jonesboro to El Dorado.
Their prejudice allowed white Southerners to look the other way when blacks were denied their most basic human rights, and it encouraged the worst of them to engage in unspeakable acts of cruelty and violence.
Writing about where I was from and the people I knew was not something that would have occurred to me early on, because like so many Southerners of that period - the Sixties - I rejected those things when I went north.
I worked with these liberal elites for 28 years at CBS News, and they were always throwing around the term 'white trash,' by which they meant poor southerners who didn't go to Harvard. I'm not sure why that makes them trash.
We could say that people who eat grits, listen to country music, follow stock-car racing, support corporal punishment in the schools, hunt 'possum, go to Baptist churches and prefer bourbon to Scotch are likely to be Southerners.
Every Southerner, I think, knows people like Bill Clinton, maybe not quite as smart and maybe not quite as liberal, but kind of a glad-handing, country-club yuppie Southerner. The problem is we don't have labels for middle-class Southerners.
It takes a willful disregard of history to appreciate how white Southerners could look at the Confederate battle flag and see states' rights or a way of life or a tradition - and not one human being whipping another, which was a common occurrence.
What a thing, Europe. Europe! The cultured Europe! We are the barbarians, the Indians, the blacks, the southerners. How cynical is Europe. Chavez the tyrant! Chavez the strongman! Chavez, who wants to stay forever. While there, they have kings, my friend!
For nearly a century, the South made itself believe that Negroes and white people were really communicating. So convinced of this were the white Southerners that they almost made the nation believe that they, and only they, knew the mind of the Southern Negro.
In 1860, the Republicans put Lincoln in the White House, and Southerners left the Union. Their absence opened the way for the new party to reshape the national government, from protecting the wealth of propertied men to promoting economic opportunity for everyone.
The Mormons' passage from bugbears of the Republican Party to its stalwarts may be analogized to a similar move among middle-class white Southerners, to whom the Republican Party was anathema until the 1970s and '80s, after which it became almost the sole representative.
My great-grandfather and his two brothers fought at Gettysburg. They were in artillery, and they survived the war, thank goodness. So I revere what they did. I think their motivations were honorable when they undertook the war and participated in it along with other Southerners.
I think of myself as a Hollywood hillbilly, but I'm sick of all these questions people ask about Alabama. 'Do you have an outhouse?' 'Is there a lot of inbreeding in your family?' They think all Southerners don't have computers and TV sets and that we're all still living in 1862.
I can see why many Southerners, black ones in particular, don't like the implication that Southernness and the Confederate heritage are one and the same, because they're not. On the other hand, there are people who want to extirpate that completely and want folks to spit on the graves of their ancestors.
Even in the '80s and '90s, many white Southerners were still bitter about court decisions that required racial integration of the schools. It wasn't that they were outwardly opposed to white and black people attending school together, it was that the rulings threatened their proud identity as independent Southerners.
Starting in the early 1800s, Southerners in the United States began to defend slavery as their 'peculiar institution,' and northerners didn't mind, since the phrase suggested that chattel bondage was quarantined from the rest of the nation: that it was, or soon would be, a relic of its past and would not define its future.
Mercer was very clever. He knew the way Southerners spoke and put that into his lyrics. But in that whole era, you had the best. Harold Arlen was just fantastic. Cole Porter was better than anybody, and Gershwin was Gershwin, y'know. Johnny Mercer started Capitol Records, and he brought in Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Nat King Cole.
With the accent, it's an internal dialogue that Southerners have with themselves. We kind of carry around that shame, that feeling of being inferior to the North. I think I did lose some of the accent for a while. Because when I was a graduate student, I was terrified at having to get up in front of a roomful of smart New York kids.