Southern Quotes

#1. Black Velvet in that little boys smile, Black Velvet with that slow southern style. A new religion that'll bring you to your knees.

Alannah Myles

#2. I think often people don't realize the great diversity of Southern writing because in their minds, if you're not from the South, it can seem regional and small, and of course that's not the case at all when you start to read the work.

Natasha Trethewey

#3. I wished that I were the owner of every southern slave, that I might cast off the shackles from their limbs, and witness the rapture which would excite them in the first dance of their freedom.

Thaddeus Stevens

#4. You might be a redneck if more than one living relative is named after a Southern Civil War general.

Jeff Foxworthy

#5. Southern people are bigger-hearted and kinder than I had any right to expect.

John Oliver

#6. I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

Maya Angelou

#7. Train service is particularly vital for the students and employees of Southern Illinois University.

Jerry Costello

#8. In Palestine, the Israelis claim they found a land without people,' a Syrian officer explained to us. 'Now they will take southern Lebanon and claim they have found another land without people if these refugees do not return.

Robert Fisk

#9. In Southern Europe, we have, of course, very bad governments.

Gore Vidal

#10. The fact is, Japan's whaling is illegal, so just because there is a natural disaster in Japan is no reason for us to stop opposing their illegal activities in the Southern Ocean.

Paul Watson

#11. Capricorn was one of the homes of the Southern rock movement with the Allman Brothers and Charlie Daniels and the Marshall Tucker Band. I don't think you can come from that area and not be influenced by that stuff a little bit, no matter what generation you grew up in.

Jason Aldean

#12. Southern racists were able to protect murderers only because their legislators exploited fears of centralized power.

Barney Frank

#13. Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris's then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian W

Marcel Proust

#14. I've been to Sardinia about 10 times because my wife, my daughter and I used to go every year with another family. We rented the same house each time in Villasimius in the southern part of the island, and always went to the same two beaches and same three restaurants.

Rick Astley

#15. To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say 'Cast down your bucket where you are.'

Booker T. Washington

#16. I could not imagine the kind of person that would, upon seeing a crazy talcum-powder-covered Southern lady think to herself, Hmmmm, she might make a great new friend. The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin.

Augusten Burroughs

#17. In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.

Saul Bellow

#18. A new poll shows that Senator Kerry's support in the South is strongest amongst blacks. Kerry's appeal to Southern blacks is obvious. He is a white man who lives far, far away.

Dennis Miller

#19. You know, so many people say TV makes you stupid. But it had the complete opposite effect on me. It kept me from having a really bad Southern accent.

DJ Qualls

#20. With Southern actors you always think you're from the same place. Even if one is from Texas, one is from Georgia, you're like, "oh, you're just down the street, man."

Lucas Till

#21. A lot of people don't understand how cargo coming into our ports matters, not just to Southern California but to every single congressional district. I want to educate on that issue.

Janice Hahn

#22. There was no way in hell she was going to move to the southern continent without all of her books.

Sarah J. Maas

#23. It's quite a thing, if you've never been in or known a small southern town. The people are not particularly sophisticated, naturally. They're not worldly wise in any way. But they tell you a story whenever they see you.

Harper Lee

#24. Most of the American films were made in southern California, so if you were in Europe, watching those palm trees swaying in the wind with someone like Rita Hayworth gliding underneath them in a white convertible, you got all kinds of wonderfully wrong ideas about the place.

Charles Simic

#25. I stand today on this floor to appeal for protection from the strong arm of the government for her loyal children, irrespective of color and race, who are citizens of the southern states, and particularly of the State of Georgia.

Hiram Rhodes Revels

#26. As a southern man, there's two things I'm definitely not scared of: bow ties and white pants.

Justin Townes Earle

#27. The other is Shenzhen, the southern city most known for electronics manufacturing - it is the location of the largest Foxconn factory, where iPhones and iPads, among other devices, are assembled.

Clay Shirky

#28. The smell of the ocean, southern breeze, blue sky, and the gentle sound of dancing waves make me sing the song of love.

Debasish Mridha

#29. G'on now.' he murmured with that Southern drawl. 'Lie on back and let me take care of you. I promise to go slow ... real slow.' - Issac Rothe, Crave

J.R. Ward

#30. I was not a Southern California girl. I hated having my photograph taken. I felt shy and embarrassed around famous people.

Allegra Huston

#31. What was very interesting to me about Clementine Hunter's work is that she couldn't read or write, and she has recorded history of the plantation life and the southern part of the U.S. - the cotton harvests, pecan picking, washing clothes, funerals, marriages - in pictures.

Robert Wilson

#32. In antiquity, there were three regions in southern Europe: Greece, Rome, and Ilyria. Albanian is the only survivor of the Ilyrian languages. That is why it has always intrigued the great linguists of the past.

Ismail Kadare

#33. I realized how lucky I was to have been raised here in these southern woods among poachers and storytellers.

Tom Franklin

#34. Bill Clinton is a classic, old-school Southern pragmatic Democrat.

Monica Crowley

#35. I grew up in southern California in the '80s. Yes, I am a walking cliche.

John Scalzi

#36. I'm accountable - this sounds emo - to black American writing, Southern writing, Southern black American writing, American writing and my people. That's kind of what keeps me accountable.

Kiese Laymon

#37. The Southern heart is too impulsive; Southern hospitality is too lavish with the stranger.
- The Spirit of Tennessee Journalism

Mark Twain

#38. It's not the impression you make, it's the impression you leave.

-A Tennessee woman remembering her Old Southern grandmother

Maryln Schwartz

#39. Yeah his being Sumerian to this group would go over like an Ozzy Osbourne/Marilyn Manson duet at the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting. He might as well be wearing a shit that said "Kibbles and Bits," with a heavy emphasis on the "bits" part ...

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#40. It was a common tactic used by Southern politicians during civil rights protests: Sue national media outlets for defamation if they provide sympathetic coverage of activists or if they characterize Southern politicians and law enforcement officers unfavorably.

Bryan Stevenson

#41. Terry Southern is the illegitimate son of Mack Sennett and Edna Saint Vincent Millay.

Kurt Vonnegut

#42. I was more influenced by players like Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen than by the guys in southern rock bands.

Dimebag Darrell

#43. Sometimes "Southern hospitality" is just another term for hypocrisy.

Lilah Pace

#44. For my part, whether sailing in cruiser or dinghy, I shall remain myself. My sails are not puffed out with the north wind in my favour, nor am I beating into the southern gales of affliction.

Horace

#45. Even in political considerations, now-a-days, you have stronger motives to feel interested in the fate of Europe than in the fate of the Central or Southern parts of America.

Lajos Kossuth

#46. While St. Louis is technically regarded as part of the Mid-West, it's actually - geographically and emotionally - more part of the South. I mean, the sensibility of St. Louis is really very much that of a Southern Mississippi river-town.

David Sanborn

#47. What I do is not regional comedy, and it is not based in the southern area.

Bill Engvall

#48. Family trips to Yellowstone and to what are now national parks in Southern Utah, driving the primitive roads and cars of that day, were real adventures.

Paul D. Boyer

#49. It was true what they said about an American woman's southern drawl being able to melt a man.

Lyla Dune

#50. I anticipate with joy the approaching period when the stigmas of poverty and pride so liberally bestowed on the highlanders by our southern gentry will be as inapplicable to the inhabitants of that country as of any in the island.

James Hogg

#51. My mother was a Democrat - southern Democrat, y'all.

Nancy Reagan

#52. I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.

Angela Davis

#53. From way up here, Southern Africa looks like a creature that's rolled over to expose the vast curve of a mottled brown belly with a grey tracery of veins.

Miranda Sherry

#54. I formally proposed. I'm a good Southern gentleman.

Vince Gill

#55. Southern Californians freak out when it rains, yet when there's an earthquake they're like 'pass the salt.

Gregor Collins

#56. All over the world, I do business. I make great deals. I've made hundreds of millions of dollars against China. All over the world I make money and I build great things. Who's going to build a wall like me on the southern border? I built a great company.

Donald Trump

#57. I'm from Southern California, so I feel much more comfortable with a golf club in my hand than I do a weapon.

Bert Blyleven

#58. I tend to play every color in the Southern rainbow, and the challenge is to make each character different so I'm not doing any generic 'Southern acting.'

Carrie Preston

#59. So, we went from being an Athens band to being a Georgia band to being a Southern band to being an American band from the East Coast to being an American band and now we're kind of an international phenomenon.

Michael Stipe

#60. O Love! what hours were thine and mine, In lands of palm and southern pine; In lands of palm, of orange-blossom, Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine!

Alfred Lord Tennyson

#61. The Warmth of Other Suns is a sweeping and yet deeply personal tale of America's hidden 20th century history - the long and difficult trek of Southern blacks to the northern and western cities. This is an epic for all Americans who want to understand the making of our modern nation.

Tom Brokaw

#62. We all had to learn Southern accents. It wasn't a big research show. With the 'Wounded Knee' project, I locked myself in my apartment with history books so I would know what we're talking about.

Anna Paquin

#63. It's nice coming to Nashville, and we have four-bedroom house and a dog, and we go swimming a lot. We get down here and spread out a lot, and I miss my sweet tea and my cornbread and my good southern cooking - but I'm down here eating pretty for two weeks and I'm ready to go back to New York City.

Justin Townes Earle

#64. I will never apologize for my Southern accent...it just may be my greatest asset.

Lola Faye Arnold

#65. I want my careless song to strike no minor key; no fiend to stand between my body's Southern song - the fusion of the South, my body's song and me.

Margaret Walker

#66. If the German people lay down their arms the whole of Eastern and Southern Europe, together with the Reich, will come under Russian occupation. Behind an iron curtain mass butcheries of people would begin.

Joseph Goebbels

#67. She was so Southern that she cried tears that came straight from the Mississippi, and she always smelled faintly of cottonwood and peaches.

Sarah Addison Allen

#68. I liked 'The Help,' and I love Viola Davis. But I didn't think that film was a great film; I thought that was a very uneven film. I thought the Southern women were so caricatured that it was kind of like 'Harper Valley PTA' or something like that.

Robert Osborne

#69. I am proud to be a Southerner. I think Southern hospitality is very ... I don't think it's just a term. I think it really exists. You can come to Savannah, and the people are so sweet and so nice.

Paula Deen

#70. Magic of Southern expressions? Similes and metaphorical allusions. They are the yellow highlighter of conversation.

Tim Heaton

#71. The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence.

Stanley Crouch

#72. I spoke bluntly about what I had seen in a little over a year as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. To the apparent surprise of many in the room, I observed publicly that insider trading appeared to be rampant.

Preet Bharara

#73. Everyone's surprised when they meet me. I guess it's because I've played tough cookies for so long ... It's what I do best. I'm not sure I could pull off a genteel Southern belle.

Rhea Perlman

#74. Oh, yeah. I grew up in Southern California in the 1960's. It was very different. I was an only child as opposed to having siblings. My brothers all lived with my step-mom. I am very close to them, but we were not raised in the same house.

David Cassidy

#75. But the reasons against going to New Orleans
that spicy southern city known for jazz and Mardi Gras and hospitality
were the very reasons we had to go.

Howard Schultz

#76. Outside of a French accent and maybe Italian, Able thought the sexiest accent had to be a soft, sophisticated Southern belle accent.

Adam W. Jones

#77. You know, a lot of those angry sort of Southern man characters that I've been doing are based on different people I might've had as, like, a soccer coach or as a teacher.

Danny McBride

#78. A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and the sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality is like a protestation against a first waft of ether.

Zelda Fitzgerald

#79. They wanted to make her less rural, less of a cartoon. Not that Southern woman are cartoonish - they're the strongest women in this country, but with Val they wanted to take the stereotypical things out.

Joan Van Ark

#80. Segregation in the South is honest, open and aboveboard. Of the two systems, or styles of segregation, the Northern and the Southern, there is no doubt whatever in my mind which is the better.

Strom Thurmond

#81. Giving Northern Europe a veto over Southern Europe's budgets will not hold a monetary union together. The euro zone will continue to need the weaker countries to stomach decades of high unemployment to grind down wages.

Austan Goolsbee

#82. I grew up in a Southern Baptist-style church with a choir, a band, and music, but I've been asking myself my whole life, "Why is my own church, my own community, rejecting me because of my sexuality?".

Roger Ross Williams

#83. At Georgia Southern, we don't cheat. That costs money and we don't have any.

Erk Russell

#84. Her new friends especially liked the southern phrases she recalled from her childhood, such as her father's remark that 'if I hadn't sold that Coca Cola stock I could just sit and pat my foot.

Sherill Tippins

#85. I'm also performing regularly in Southern California with two bands. As a solo artist doing acoustic sets and a member of the Jenerators, my rock n roll band that has been around for a long time now.

Bill Mumy

#86. We still need to secure our southern border. The other thing I would say is we need to secure who visits us in the country.

Rand Paul

#87. I'm a southern gentleman.

Jamie Foxx

#88. I've written a lot about southern California, but I don't use the same characters. Leave the people in the songs in the songs, is my philosophy.

John Darnielle

#89. Then I went off to Southern Methodist University in Dallas. They had a really wonderful theatre department.

Beth Henley

#90. In a completely integrated unit where you'd have white soldiers, particularly from southern states, serving under black noncommissioned officers or officers ... I think you would have a problem definitely.

Omar N. Bradley

#91. As weird as it is, as much as I love Southern California, the reality is I'm going to be somewhere else next season.

Kassim Osgood

#92. Things have changed," Mother answered, her gaze drawn to the southern horizon. "So we change with them.

Mindy McGinnis

#93. Probably the first time I was a boss was when I was associate dean of the graduate school at the University of Southern California. I was in my early 30s.

Ruth J. Simmons

#94. The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today is the whole southern half of the globe ... the lands of the rising peoples. Their revolution is the greatest in human history. They seek an end to injustice, tyranny and exploitation. More than an end, they seek a beginning.

John F. Kennedy

#95. My husband doesn't listen because his mother didn't make him listen. What am I going to do, beat him? I mean: firstborn of a southern family? Firstborn boy? Please. I mean, I love him to death, but is he going to take the garbage out? No.

Carol Bartz

#96. I don't go around thinking about regret; regret doesn't consume me as a person ... I'm not certain about whether any writer, any artist, any musician, can write without regret, so I don't think perhaps it's even particularly Southern.

Barry Hannah

#97. It was the kind ... of Southern women ... who believe ... that it is impossible to arrive in a new place without a pair of shoes to match every possible change of clothes.

Rebecca Wells

#98. Attacking the indecency of life in much of the Southern Hemisphere is no longer a matter of grace, of charity, of patronizing kindness. It is a matter of intense self-interest.

Anthony Lewis

#99. I'm a Southern lady that almost never leaves the house without makeup on.

Ginnifer Goodwin

#100. Southern Europe has not done enough to enhance its competitiveness, while northern Europe has not done enough to boost demand. Debt burdens remain crushing, and Europe's economy remains unable to grow.

Barry Eichengreen