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Quotes About Southerners

Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings.
~ Harper Lee
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.
~ Bobbie Ann Mason
Southerners could not throw off the Constitution and at the same time invoke it to protect slavery.
~ Stephen B. Oates
Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole.
~ Terry Pratchett
Jefferson belonged to that large class if southerners--including the best of them, nen like Washington and Madison--who knew that slavery was evil, but felt they could not cut back in the evil without cutting the ground out from under them. They knew, as well, that they would lose their influence over other southerners if they went against the system off which they lived.
~ Garry Wills
The human heart is a lonely hunter-but the search for us southerners is more anguished.....
~ Carson McCullers
The perpetual demonization of the South and Southerners is part and parcel of the Lincoln myth. The continued demonization of everything Southern is part of the gatekeepers' strategy to keep the public from ever becoming curious about alternative interpretations of nineteenth-century history.
~ Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Liberal education is inevitably pluralistic," he lamented. "It would follow that Southerners are clearly wrong in resisting integration of white and Negro pupils.
~ Katherine Stewart
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.
~ Greg Iles
There is racism all over the United States. Most Southerners I know, we definitely find ourselves defending our heritage.
~ Octavia Spencer
Southerners have this love of embellishment. Even when you read a police report, there's some backstory.
~ Karin Slaughter
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.
~ Jessie James Decker
I do play a lot of Southerners because I grew up in the South, but they're still diverse.
~ Carrie Preston
Oh, Jesus.' 'He's a Northerner too. Lived in Israel, but a Northerner in His heart. His bleeding heart. His cute little old bleeding red heart. Southerners think they own Him, but that's just because the first time they laid eyes on Him, He was strung up on a tree. They can relate to that, see. Both the stringer and the strung.
~ Toni Morrison
In their attitude to history, some New Zealanders resembled die-hard white Southerners in America, who enshrined Confederate leaders and symbols without acknowledging the offense this might cause to others. Sheila
~ Tony Horwitz
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!
~ Hugo Chavez
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.
~ Tony Bennett
By contrast, said Jefferson, the Southerners were "fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart.
~ Gordon S. Wood
The movement away from the party was clear by 1936, when 43 of the 102 congressional Democrats from the South deserted the party on votes more than half the time.35 Many southerners thought the worst of the Great Depression was over and saw no need for the New Deal's expanding welfare state and federal bureaucracy. The Roosevelt programs to help the South drew unwanted blacks to the Democratic Party.
~ James C. Clark
all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state's rights and a weak federal government. The exception was the fugitive slave law of 1850, which gave the national government more power than any other law yet passed by Congress. This irony resulted from the Supreme Court's decision in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842). In the typical oblique
~ James M. McPherson
Babcock knew no Southerners personally but he had seen them in court often enough...and Ed's manner and appearance said Dixie to him. He imagined Ed at home with his family, a big one, from old geezers to toddlers. He saw them eating their yams and pralines and playing their fiddles and dancing their jigs and guffawing over coarse jokes and beating one another to death with agricultural implements.
~ Charles Portis
So great was the quest for patronage that Lincoln came to hope that Southerners would never leave the Union and abandon the plum government jobs they might retain if they remained loyal. As he joked rather cynically to the Ohio editor and politician Donn Piatt over a chicken dinner at the Lincoln home: "Were it believed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road there would be lined with dead Virginians.
~ Harold Holzer
Even in the debates, so repellent was slavery to northerners—and so embarrassing to southerners—that when the subject came up, the delegates often danced around it, employing euphemisms, such as "this unique species of property" or "this unhappy class," as stand-ins for the more disagreeable "slaves." Thus, the words "slave" and "slavery" never appeared in the original Constitution, nor would they until ninety-one years later when the thirteenth amendment abolished the practice
~ Lawrence Goldstone
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.
~ Molly Ivins