Markham Shaw Pyle Quotes

#1. But that's the thing about East Texas. Red dirt never quite washes out, and pine pollen is tenacious as original sin. You can leave East Texas, for Houston, for the Metroplex, for the Commonwealth, for New York, or Bonn or Tokyo or Kowloon; but you can never quite leave it behind.

Markham Shaw Pyle

#2. Justice can readily do her job blindfolded; she cannot function gagged and deafened, least of all when the means of gagging and deafening her are not remarked.

Markham Shaw Pyle

#3. Over the course of human history, many items have briefly flourished as means of exchange, only to be demonetarized. Now, we have demonetarized money.

Markham Shaw Pyle

#4. Of all America's natural resources, its richest is an inexhaustible vein of irony.

Markham Shaw Pyle

#5. No matter where you go in East Texas, 'Deep' East Texas is always about twenty miles further in than wherever you are.

Markham Shaw Pyle

#6. It was left to the Progressive movement in America (as to the Fabians in Britain) to promote eugenics, Prohibition, dietary fads, the compulsory sterilisation of those they deemed 'unfit', and preferential treatment in immigration law of 'Nordic' (and preferably Protestant) immigrants.

Markham Shaw Pyle

#7. If the power to tax is the power to destroy, the power to regulate is no less so.

Markham Shaw Pyle

#8. This side of the Kingdom of God upon Earth, it is a melancholy human fact that those who beat their swords into plowshares end up doing the plowing for those who kept their swords.

Markham Shaw Pyle

#9. For four centuries now, the American people have resigned themselves to natural disasters and acts of God: floods, prairie fires, blizzards, tornados, hurricanes, dust bowls, epidemics, academics, lawyers, and politicians.

Markham Shaw Pyle

#10. Public life in this country is too damn dominated by people who'd read more if only their lips didn't get so tired.

Markham Shaw Pyle

#11. As it happens, however, no one in my family recognizes the existence of an impossibility. (We're not specially courageous, we're just bullheaded as all get-out, and the whole lot of us as independent as a hog on ice. Every last one of us would argue with a wooden cigar-store Indian.)

Markham Shaw Pyle