Southern Illinois Quotes

Amtrak is extremely important to the economy of Southern Illinois and I will continue to work with state and local leaders and my colleagues in Congress to secure the necessary funding to maintain full service. ~ Jerry Costello

Train service is particularly vital for the students and employees of Southern Illinois University. ~ Jerry Costello

Like a lot of rural places, southern Illinois is basically a bunch of small towns knit together, a Babel's Tower mix of rednecks, rubes, freaks, tweakers, gun nuts, and aging hippies--real hippies, not the newfangled crunchy kids they're turning out these days--who'd fled into the dark-licked hills sometime during the bloodiest days of a war that wouldn't stop shaping their lives and had never come out. ~ Jason Miller

When I was in high school, my uncle, who went to the races quite a bit, got me interested. Then when I went to college at Southern Illinois University, just a few hours from Louisville, we used to go to the Kentucky Derby, and I got to see Secretariat and Riva Ridge win. ~ Kenny Troutt

From a young age, I wanted to play in the NBA. Oh well ... It was when I was a senior in college that I fell for film, but even then, it wasn't documentaries. It wasn't until I ended up in graduate school at Southern Illinois University that I really discovered documentaries and thought that maybe that would be my calling. ~ Steve James

I was enamored of New York City intellectual life and was really into Philip Roth because I was raised by self-loathing Midwesterners who were from southern Illinois, who felt like fish out of water when they came to the East Coast when I was a kid. ~ Meghan Daum

As long as there is a Southern Ocean whale sanctuary, Sea Shepherd crew will continue to patrol and defend it. ~ Paul Watson

The biggest challenge I have with Washingtonians is they think Illinois is exclusively a Democratic state. ~ Mark Kirk

People look at things differently. Imagine going to a village in Southern Sudan and try to explain to someone there the concept of life insurance or retirement. Go to Vietnam and say retirement. Retirement in another country is your body is too racked with pain and your hands are too arthritic from the life in the rice patty fields, so you can't work anymore. So you move in with your son and his new wife takes care of you because that's how families work there. ~ Henry Rollins

It's the greatest of Southern honors ... to have one's name incorporated into a family tree. It's an honor not lightly given. ~ Sheri Holman

I grew up in Cleveland and started doing plays in high school. And I went to the University of Illinois, and I majored in drama. And after school, I went up to Chicago, because I didn't really know anybody in New York or Los Angeles, and I knew people who were doing plays in Chicago. ~ Alan Ruck

The very rationalists who jeer at the trial by combat, in the old feudal ordeal, do in fact accept a trial by combat as deciding all human history. In the war of the North and South in America, some of the Southern rebels wrote on their flags the rhyme, "Conquer we must for our cause is just." The philosophy was faulty; and in that sense it served them right that their opponents copied and continued it in the form "Conquer they didn't; so their cause wasn't." But the latter logic is as bad as the former. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I don't think immigration is what's happening in our country. I think an invasion is what is happening, particularly southern border. ~ Rush Limbaugh

I started to meditate formally at about 18. I would sit on a mountaintop in Southern California around twilight and focus on my third eye. Everything would become still and rings of light would appear, and I'd go through them. I would be beyond time and space. ~ Frederick Lenz

Well if this be order
give me a wheelbarruh of chaos
and a pop bottle full of shook up rattlesnakes ~ Bob Henry Baber

Has anyone else ... "
"Hmm?" Grams walked the paper back across the room and took up her tray of hospital good again, settling it over me. "Has anyone else, what?:
"Been by," I mumbled. "To visit."
Grams gave me a knowing smile. "A charming young woman with a mouth that could give a sailor a heart attack? A sweet little one who brought you flowers? The one who spent half a day chasing doctors and nurses around, demanding answers about your condition? Or, by any chance are you referring to a very well - mannered Southern boy? ~ Alexandra Bracken

Los Angeles in 1912 was a sprawling flatland stretching between the ocean and the mountains. Within a thirty-five-mile radius, there were forty incorporated towns, and it was close to impossible to know where one ended and another began. While the southern California land boom of the 1880s had not brought the number of people who swarmed northern California in the Gold Rush, it had induced a variety of characters to seek out the sun and a new life. Families determined to create their own little utopias bought several hundred or thousands of acres at a time, primarily from the Spanish land grants that still dominated the area, infusing the new communities with their Midwestern values. ~ Cari Beauchamp

Area 51 is located in southern Nevada desert about 75 miles north of Las Vegas. It's set inside a greater land parcel that's about the size of the state of Connecticut that's called the 'Nevada Test and Training Range.' ~ Annie Jacobsen

The end of toleration in 1685 left a legacy of bitterness and instability in France, for it failed to destroy the Huguenots, while encouraging an arrogance and exclusiveness within the established Catholic Church. In the great French. Revolution after 1789 this divide was one of the forces encouraging the extraordinary degree of revulsion against Catholic Church institutions, clergy and religious that produced the atrocities of the 1790s; beyond that it created the anticlericalism which has been so characteristic of the left in the politics of modern southern Europe. In the history of modern France, it is striking how the areas in the south that after 1572 formed the Protestant heartlands continued to form the backbone of anti-clerical, anti-monarchical voters for successive Republics, and even in the late twentieth century they were still delivering a reliable vote for French Socialism. ~ Diarmaid MacCulloch

I refuse to believe that Southern pride stems from the pain we've inflicted on others. Southern pride comes from what we've built together. In our music and art and innovation.

In the people who honor us by taking our culture out into the world and celebrating it. It comes from people seeking us out, and flocking here to experience all that we know and love.

We are all neighbors. We are all Southerners. This is OUR culture, and it means what WE choose it to mean.

So, yes. I'll say it again - Southern Pride is good collard greens.

Death to the flag.

Long live the South. ~ Jason Latour

Many politicians and preachers defended slavery, citing the Bible's approval of the practice, the inferiority of the African race, the value of preserving the southern way of life, and a paternalistic concern that freed slaves could not survive on their own. ~ Steven Pinker

My wife is a terrific Southern cook. My favorite of all the great things she cooks is 'trash potatoes.' That's mashed potatoes with sour cream, bacon, cheddar cheese, and horseradish. It's a total gut bomb. ~ Mike Vogel

I'm not a southern lady, I'm from Pennsylvania and we speak sort of correctly there. People identify me that way and they also easily identify me on the street because of my short stature. I get picked out in many ways and no way is a burden. ~ Zelda Rubinstein

The Arctic is an ocean. The southern pole is a continent surrounded by ocean. The North Pole is an ocean, or northern waters. It's an ocean surrounded by land, basically. ~ Sylvia Earle

Protecting the environment is an obligation, not a choice. ~ Southern African Birds SASOL

Like the magnolia tree,
She bends with the wind,
Trials and tribulation may weather her,
Yet, after the storm her beauty blooms,
See her standing there, like steel,
With her roots forever buried,
Deep in her Southern soil. ~ Nancy B. Brewer

If we want to understand the actions of a man in the early 1860's, put yourself back there in his shoes. As a young man he began piloting steamboats on the Mississippi, a job he loved and wanted to do the rest of his life, he said. The Civil War ended traffic on the River and his job. He wrote about it in A History of A Campaign That Failed. He said: "I joined the Confederacy, served for two weeks, deserted, and the Confederacy fell." His attachment to the Southern ideal of slavery does not appear very sturdy. ~ Hal Holbrook

My immune system has always been overly welcoming of germs. It's far too polite, the biological equivalent of a southern hostess inviting y'all nice microbes to stay awhile and have some artichoke dip. ~ A. J. Jacobs

I had a teacher who recommended I take improv classes in Chicago - I'm from Evanston, Illinois - so I did improv classes at Improv Olympic, and that kind of opened me up. ~ Lauren Lapkus

Tons. Marco Polo, who sailed from China to Persia on his return home, described the Mongol ships as large four-masted junks with up to three hundred crewmen and as many as sixty cabins for merchants carrying various wares. According to Ibn Battuta, some of the ships even carried plants growing in wooden tubs in order to supply fresh food for the sailors. Khubilai Khan promoted the building of ever larger seagoing junks to carry heavy loads of cargo and ports to handle them. They improved the use of the compass in navigation and learned to produce more accurate nautical charts. The route from the port of Zaytun in southern China to Hormuz in the Persian Gulf became the main sea link between the Far East and the Middle East, and was used by both Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, among others. ~ Jack Weatherford

A SASSY SOUTHERN FEMALE CAN WRITE A LOVE STORY AS WELL AS A MALE...IF Y'ALL GET MY DRIFT. ~ Lola Faye Arnold

Things like this don't happen back in Libertyville, Illinois.
You don't get lost in the woods behind your house.
You don't get trapped inside a fortress-like wall ten feet tall. ~ Travis Thrasher

Except on their southern borders the great northern forests are not good as a permanent home for man. ~ Ellsworth Huntington

Our prayers at this time are prompted by the fact that the Governor of Illinois today is signing into Illinois law the redefinition of civil marriage, introducing not only an unprecedented novelty into our state law, but also institutionalizing an objectively sinful reality. ~ Thomas J. Paprocki

Yet when, one day, standing on the outskirts of Yokohama town, bristling with its display of modern miscellanies, I watched the sunset in your southern sea, and saw its peace and majesty among your pine-clad hills, - with the great Fujiyama growing faint against the golden horizon, like a god overcome with his own radiance, - the music of eternity welled up through the evening silence, and I felt that the sky and the earth and the lyrics of the dawn and the dayfall are with the poets and idealists, and not with the marketmen robustly contemptuous of all sentiment, - that, after the forgetfulness of his own divinity, man will remember again that heaven is always in touch with his world, which can never be abandoned for good to the hounding wolves of the modern era, scenting human blood and howling to the skies. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

In 2006 I had begun the discernment process for locating my rightful geographic home. By the time my corporate pink slip arrived I had spent two years researching and taking recon trips to five different cities in southern California. Having crossed them off my list, in February 2008 I visited Sarasota, Florida, at the urging of a friend who winters in a neighboring town. Though Florida had never been on my radar, only minutes in Sarasota I knew I'd found home. ~ Gina Greenlee

On August 10, 1984, my plane landed in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. There were no skyscrapers here. The blue domes of the mosques and the faded mountains were the only things rising above the adobe duvals (the houses). The mosques came alive in the evening with multivoiced wailing: the mullahs were calling the faithful to evening prayer. It was such an unusual spectacle that, in the beginning, I used to leave the barracks to listen – the same way that, in Russia, on spring nights, people go outside to listen to the nightingales sing. For me, a nineteen-year-old boy who had lived his whole life in Leningrad, everything about Kabul was exotic: enormous skies – uncommonly starry – occasionally punctured by the blazing lines of tracers. And spread out before you, the mysterious Asian capital where strange people were bustling about like ants on an anthill: bearded men, faces darkend by the sun, in solid-colored wide cotton trousers and long shirts. Their modern jackets, worn over those outfits, looked completely unnatural. And women, hidden under plain dull garments that covered them from head to toe: only their hands visible, holding bulging shopping bags, and their feet, in worn-out shoes or sneakers, sticking out from under the hems.

And somewhere between this odd city and the deep black southern sky, the wailing, beautifully incomprehensible songs of the mullahs. The sounds didn't contradict each other, but rather, in a polyphonic echo, melted away among the ~ Vladislav Tamarov

At Georgia Southern, we don't cheat. That costs money and we don't have any. ~ Erk Russell

And so Jefferson wrote the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which organized the new territories of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin so that slavery would be permanently illegal there. ~ Allen C. Guelzo

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

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

-A Tennessee woman remembering her Old Southern grandmother ~ Maryln Schwartz

In southern Spain, they made me eat a bull's testicles. They were really garlicky, which I don't like. I prefer to take a bull by the horns, not by, um ... ~ Padma Lakshmi

By the 1850s enslavers had their eyes on expansion into Cuba in order to expand Southern political power. Here we see an idyllic image of a Cuba tobacco plantation, plus the idea of "Southern rights" being used to sell cigars. "Southerner rights segars. Expressly manufactured for Georgia & Alabama by Salomon Brothers. Fabrica de tabacos, de superior calidad de la vuelta-abajo," Broadside, 1859. ~ Edward E. Baptist

Growing up Southern is a privilege, really. It's more than where you were born, it's an idea and state of mind that seems imparted at birth. It's more than loving fried chicken, football, beer, and country music. It's being hospitable and devoted to screen porches, magnolias, red velvet cake, coca cola, and each other. We don't become southern--we're born that way. ~ Hank Williams Jr.

Which are you?" "I'm feline. So are you. So are most Southern men an' most of these girls ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Interest in alchemy seems to be nowadays on the rise. Whereas the educated public at large remains no doubt skeptical and indeed disdainful of the ancient discipline, there is today a deepening awareness among the better informed that what stands behind many an "exploded superstition" may be in fact a long-forgotten wisdom. Although Carl Jung was obviously exaggerating when ! he suggested that four centuries after being expelled from our universities,- alchemy stands "knocking at the door," a number of factors have conspired; to render the prospect of re-admission less remote, at least, than it had been ; during the heyday of materialism. In any case, no truly solid grounds for rejecting the ancient doctrine have yet been proposed. Take the case of the so-called four elements: earth, water, air and fire. One can be reasonably certain that these terms were not employed alchemically in their ordinary sense, but were used to designate elements, precisely, out of which substances, as we know them, are constituted. Somewhat like the quarks of modern physics, these elements are not found empirically in isolation, but occur in their multiple combinations, that is to say, as the perceptible substances that constitute what I term the corporeal domain. Now, as I have argued at length in The Quantum Enigma (Peru, Illinois: Sherwood Sugden, 1995), corporeal objects are not in fact mere aggregates of quantum particles; and this clearly suggests that there may indeed be elements of the afo ~ Wolfgang Smith

There is no identifiable accent here unless you've cultivated a very careful ear. This is an easy place to live, milder in feel than Nebraska to the west, negligibly warmer in the winter than Minnesota to the north, of less imagined consequence to the world than Illinois to the east or Missouri to the south. ~ John Darnielle

Southern California is the land of crazy crimes. ~ Don Carpenter

People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile. ~ Alan Lomax