Southern Governors Quotes

Rep. John Lewis, Georgia Democrat and a civil rights leader during the 1960s, was one of those calling on the president for a more robust federal response, such as President Dwight D. Eisenhower did against Jim Crow-defending Southern governors. ~ Anonymous

The rhetoric of 'law and order' was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern States to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order. Support of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely 'rewarding lawbreakers.'
For more than a decade – from the mid 1950s until the late 1960s – conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr.'s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime. ~ Michelle Alexander

Everything creepy and Southern isn't Faulknerian, just like everything annoying isn't Kafkaesque. ~ Scott Spencer

In 1955 flying was much more dangerous than it is now, but there was a party atmosphere aboard long flights and everyone enjoyed the ever-flowing drinks and food. Smoking was the norm and it didn't take long before the cabin was full of smoke. The stewardesses were friendly and I can remember some that were very friendly.

I don't remember much about my time in Lisbon because, before I knew it, we were in the air again heading south across the ocean to the vastness of the North African desert. The light yellow sand under us in Morocco and the Spanish Sahara was endless. The fine sand went from the barren coastal surf and endless miles of beautiful beaches, inland as far as the eye could see.

After a time I saw what I believed, at the time, to be a radio relay station located out on a desolate sand spit near Villa Bens. It was only later that I found out that it was Castelo de Tarfaya, a small fortification on the North African coast. Tarfaya was occupied by the British in 1882, when they established a trading post called Casa del Mar. This forgotten part of the world is now in the southern part of Morocco. ~ Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater Two...."

I was raised in a strict Southern household in Lexington, South Carolina, and I remember sneaking off to watch 'Pet Cemetery' as a kid. After seeing those animals reincarnate, I screamed and couldn't sleep for weeks, but watched it again and again. ~ Jessica Stroup

I haven't taught since 2004, but I taught high school English for seven years, primarily at a place called Haddonfield Memorial, which is in a very well-to-do-community in Southern New Jersey. ~ Matthew Quick

For years, I meant to read 'Arabian Sands', Wilfred Thesiger's account of two punishing camel journeys during the late 1940s across Southern Arabia's Empty Quarter. Now that I have, I can sheepishly join the chorus of those who revere the book as one of the half dozen greatest works of modern English travel writing. ~ Michael Dirda

Vidalia, open those eyes and look at me. As with all things, we do this together, Darlin'. ~ Julia Mills

I think the governors would all agree that what we don't want from the federal government is unfunded mandates. ~ James Douglas

I was with Tina Turner when she first saw Janis Joplin, and she said to Janis, 'Honey, you can't continue to sing like that, or you'll have no voice,' and Janis' response was just to laugh and take a swig on her Southern Comfort. ~ Michael Wadleigh

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati ... when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot. ~ Ezra Pound

To say that subjects in general are not proper judges (of the law) when their governors oppress them and play the tyrant, and when they defend their rights ... is as great a treason as ever a man uttered. ~ Jonathan Mayhew

He ascended the mountain in darkness, no lamplight, a world black and silver and blue. The moon lay scattered through the woods in blades, glowing palely, the wind rising now and again to moan through the trees. The trail scrawled ever upward, toward the looming darkness of the mountain's peak. Above it all the sea of night, the strange ornamentation of stars. ~ Taylor Brown

Many people, after spending a long weekend being stealthily seduced by this grand dame of the South, mistakenly think that they have gotten to know her: they believe (in error) that after a long stroll amongst the rustling palmettoes and gas lamps, a couple of sumptuous meals, and a tour or two, that they have discovered everything there is to know about this seemingly genteel, elegant city. But like any great seductress, Charleston presents a careful veneer of half-truths and outright fabrications, and it lets you, the intended conquest, fill in many of the blanks. Seduction, after all, is not true love, nor is it a gentle act. She whispers stories spun from sugar about pirates and patriots and rebels, about plantations and traditions and manners and yes, even ghosts; but the entire time she is guarded about the real story. Few tourists ever hear the truth, because at the dark heart of Charleston is a winding tale of violence, tragedy and, most of all, sin. ~ James Caskey

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

(Charles Morgan, Jr., Southern Director of the ACLU in 1966, upon seeing conditions in the Jefferson County jail):

...I knew that [Southern whites] would have annihilated blacks had they been more literate and less useful. In Hitler's Germany armbands identified Jews. Those with black skin could have been annihilated more easily. But they were the labor pool with which to break strikes. They served as the pickers of cotton, the diggers of ditches. They emptied bedpans and cleaned the outhouses of our lives. Uneducated, property-less, disenfranchised, and excluded from justice, except as defendants, they were no threat to whites. While they remained useful and didn't get 'out of line,' their lives were assured, for no matter how worthless lower-class white folks said blacks were, the rich, well born, and able upper-class whites knew that they and black folks were really the only people indispensably required by Our Southern Way of Life. (188) ~ Wayne Greenhaw

They met near the southern limit of the establishment grounds and for a while they spoke in an abbreviated and Aesopic language. They understood each other well, with many decades of communication behind them, and it was not necessary for them to involve themselves in all the elaboration's of human speech.

Daneel said in an all but unhearable whisper, "Clouds. Unseen."

Had Daneel been speaking for human ears, he would have said, "As you see, friend Giskard, the sky has clouded up. Had Madam Gladia waited her chance to see Solaria, she would not, in any case, have succeeded."

And Giskard's reply of "Predicted. Interview, rather," was the equivalent of "So much was predicted in the weather forecast, friend Daneel, and might have been used as an excuse to get Madam Gladia to bed early. It seemed to me to be more important, however, to meet the problem squarely and to persuade her to permit this interview I have already told you about. ~ Isaac Asimov

grown up poor in the midst of Southern California affluence, graduated from Stanford Law School, and held a series of jobs, including corporate lawyer, developer of vast Southern California orange groves, and deputy chair of ~ Gwenda Blair

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. We are all absolutely free. If everybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled - by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

There's been a growing effort to kick soda out of the schools. And governors as different as Arnold Schwarzenegger in California and Mike Huckabee in Arkansas have worked hard to get soda and junk food out of their state schools, which is good. ~ Eric Schlosser

Mamaw's spirit lingers there, her high-bubbled laugh
carrying on like a song, her quiet dignity still holding
together the air that holds up this house. ~ Christina M. Ward

For most governors, we find the United States Senate or the United States Congress very frustrating at the slow pace in which they act. There doesn't seem to be a lot of discipline and organization to what they do. ~ Dave Heineman

Especially when you live in the Southern US of A. Winter is a novelty season, a niche job. Winter wonderland? Forget about it! You were more likely to spend it in the wading pool. One horse open sleigh? Forget about it! Unless that sleigh was a trashcan lid and that horse was a 4-wheeler. ~ J.V. Roberts

What white Southerners called "redemption" and others deemed simply the return to power of the Democrats, who sufficiently intimidated, cheated and otherwise discouraged Republicans, including most of the freedmen, that they counted for little in Southern politics. With any Democratic presidential nominee guaranteed the South, any Republican had to perform overwhelmingly in the North. ~ H.W. Brands

For everything there is a season. I'd miss having the seasons, people from New York like to say by way of indicating the extraordinary pride they take in not living in Southern California. In fact Southern California does have seasons (it has for example "fire season" or "the season when the fire comes," and it also has the season when the rains comes, but such Southern California seasons, arriving as they do so theatrically as to seem strokes of random fate, do not inexorably suggest the passage of time. Those other seasons, the ones so prized on the East Coast, do. Seasons in Southern California suggest violence, but not necessarily death.
Seasons in New York-the relentless dropping of the leaves, the steady darkening of the days, the blue nights themselves-suggest only death. ~ Joan Didion

Southern lawyers don't read novels much. ~ Harper Lee

No: until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until I am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case. ~ Henry David Thoreau

meander, v.

"...because when it all comes down to it, there's no such thing as a two-hit wonder. So it's better just to have that one song that everyone knows, instead of diluting it with a follow-up that only half succeeds. I mean, who really cares what Soft Cell's next single was, as long as we have 'Tainted Love'?"
I stop. You're still listening.
"Wait," I say. "What was I talking about? How did we get to 'Tainted Love'?"
"Let's see," you say, "I believe we started roughly at the Democratic gains in the South, then jumped back to the election of 1948, dipping briefly into northern constructions of the South, vis-a-vis Steel Magnolias, Birth of a Nation, Johnny Cash, and Fried Green Tomatoes. Which landed you on To Kill a Mockingbird, and how it is both Southern and universal, which -- correct me if I'm wrong -- got us to Harper Lee and her lack of a follow-up novel, intersected with the theory, probably wrong, that Truman Capote wrote the novel, then hopping over to literary one-hit wonders, and using musical one-hit wonders to make a point about their special place in our culture. I think."
"Thank you," I say. "That's wonderful. ~ David Levithan

One cannot help asking sadly, why is love of gold more potent than love of souls? The number of men mining and prospecting for gold in Shantung is more than double the number of men representing Southern Baptists! What a lesson for Southern Baptists to ponder! ~ Lottie Moon

With every word the mist which had enveloped them, making them seem unreal to each other, since the previous afternoon melted a little further, and their contact became more and more natural. Up through the sultry southern landscape they saw the world they knew appear clearer and more vividly than it had ever appeared before. ~ Virginia Woolf

Today it's something about hallucinogenic tea, but tomorrow it could be something that Roman Catholics or Southern Baptists or a number of groups need some accommodation in relation to a federal law. ~ Charles Haynes

Well, honey, it is the south. These debutantes know how to verbally kick anyone's ass. They learned it from their mamas in the womb. ~ Magan Vernon

I'm from the South, where if you walk down the street and there's somebody behind you talking with a Southern accent, you can't tell whether it's a black or a white person. ~ Johnnie Cochran

Some settlers began with no implements but an ax. In conversation, the subject of axes
their ideal weight, their proper helves
was more popular than politics or religion. A man who made good axes, who knew the secrets of tempering the steel and getting the center of gravity right, received the celebrity of an artist and might act accordingly. The best ax maker in southern Indiana was "a dissolute, drunken genius, named Richardson." Men who really knew how to chop became famous, too. An ax blow requires the same timing of weight shift and wrist action as a golf swing, and as in golf those who where good at it taught others; sometimes all the men in one district learned their stroke from the same axman extraordinaire. A good stroke had a "sweetness" similar to the sound of a well-struck golf or tennis ball, and gave a satisfaction which moved the work along. ~ Ian Frazier

The Governor has no presidential aspirations. In fact he just made a tour of 43 states just to tell them he's not running for anything. ~ Bob Hope

I find standard American the hardest. It really fits in a different place in your mouth. Southern, I find the easiest. If you talk to a dialect coach and you get sort of technical, where an English person keeps their voice in their throat, a Southern person does the same, and it's got the same sort of music to talking. ~ Juno Temple