"Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy. If something intolerable simply cannot be changed, driven away or shot they will not only tolerate it but take pride in it as well. " Florence King "Southerners can never resist a losing cause." Margaret Mitchell The Southerner always tended to believe with his blood rather than his intellect." Marshall Frady "I don't think of myself as a Negro. I'm a Southerner. I just like the Southern way of life." Julian Bond "I love everything about the South; I even love hate." Brother Dave Gardner "O magnet-South! O glistening perfumed South! my South! O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! Good and evil! O all dear to me!" Walt Whitman "I like the South because of the people. They are loyal. Once they love a team, they're fans forever. " Dominique Wilkins "Because I was born in the South, I'm a Southerner. If I had been born in the North, the West or the Central Plains, I would be just a human being." Clyde Edgerton "Everyone from the South knows who Jefferson David was, and this is one thing that distinguishes the South from other parts of the country. " William F. Buckley "The only place in the world that nothing has to be explained to me is the South. " Woodrow Wilson "The South may not always be right, but by God it's never wrong! " Brother Dave Gardner "I suggest that the true Southland is that territory within which, when asked by an outsider whether he is a Southerner, the reply almost invariably is 'Hell yes!' This 'Hell yes' line has the advantage of eliminating the ambivalent wishy washy fringes, and leaving the unquestionably defiant, hard-core Southland." Hamilton C. Horton, Jr. "Southerners make such good novelists; they have so many good stories because they have so much family." Gore Vidal "I'm Southern and I know neurotic behavior." Faye Dunaway "Southern barbeque is the closest thing we have in the U.S. to Europe's wines and cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbeque changes." John Shelton Reed "My mother's people, the people who captured my imagination when I was growing up, were of the Deep South "emotional, changeable, touched with charisma and given to histrionic flourishes. They were courageous under tension and unexpectedly tough beneath their wild eccentricities, for they had and unusually close working agreement with God. They also had an unusually high quota of bulls**t. " Willie Morris "Anyone with a lick of sense knows that you can't make good barbeque and comply with the health code." John Edgerton "The summer picnic gave the ladies a chance to show off their baking hands. On the barbeque pit, chickens and spareribs sputtered in their own fat and a sauce whose recipe was guarded in the family like a scandalous affair." Maya Angelou "Next to fried food, the South has suffered most from oratory. " Walter Hines Page "When the taste changes with every bite and the last bite tastes as good as the first, that's Cajun. " Paul Prudhomme "True grits, more grits, fish, grits, and collards. Life is good where grits are swallered. " Roy Blount, Jr. "Memphis Martini: Gin with a wad of cotton in it. " Fred Allen "What you need for breakfast, they say in East Tennessee, is a jug of good corn liquor, a thick steak and a hound dog. Then you feed the steak to the dog." Charles Kuralt "The tragedy of the redneck is that he chose the wrong enemy." Will D. Campbell "Yes, charisma is the middle name of scads of Southern cads." Rosemary Daniel "Southern women see no contradiction in mixing strength with gentleness." Sharon McKern "The friend asked why the Rebel Army had continued to fight when defeat was certain. They were simply afraid to go home and face their women." Gordon Cotton "I've always said that next to Imperial China, the South is the best place in the world to be an old lady. " Florence King The South is a region that history has happened to. "Richard Weaver The past is not dead. It isn't even past. "William Faulkner "The remark has been made that in the Civil War the North reaped the victory and the South the glory." Richard Weaver "The young bloods of the South; sons of planters, lawyers about towns, good billiard players and sportsmen, men who never did any work and never will. 'War suits them'. They are splendid riders, first rate shots and utterly reckless' These men must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace." General W. T. Sherman "When the smoke and fire was over, the Negroes had nothing gained, the whites had nothing left, while the jackals have all the booty." R.H. Cain "In the South the war is what A.D. is elsewhere; they date from it." Mark Twain "As long as the Negroes are held down by deprivation and lack of opportunity, the other poor people will be held down alongside them." Governor Big Jim Folsom "We went across the South on Super Tuesday without a single catcall or boo, without a single ugly sign. Not until we got to New York and the North did the litmus test of race and religion spout from the mouths of public officials." Jesse Jackson "Every time I look at Atlanta I see what a quarter of a million Confederate soldiers died to prevent." John Shelton Reed "I just got wonderful news from my real estate agent in Florida. They found land on my property." Milton Berle "I didn't make Arkansas the butt of ridicule. God did." H.L. Mencken "Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They are inexpensive and easy to procure." Robert Penn Warren "I like the South because it is so much warmer on the sidelines than it is up North " Coach Tom Landry "I know why we lost the Civil War. We must have had the same officials." Coach Bum Phillips on losing the Senior Bowl "Young feller, you will never appreciate the potentialities of the English language until you have heard a Southern mule driver search the soul of a mule." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. "In Southern English 'naked' means you ain't got no clothes on, while 'nekkid' means you ain't got no clothes on and you are up to something." Lewis Grizzard "Why do Southern women avoid group sex? Too many thank you notes." John Shelton Reed "People down South are incredibly polite. Even their war was civil." Dudley Moore "Southerners will be polite until the are angry enough to kill you." John Shelton Reed "No lie, the average Yankee knows as much about the South as a hog knows about the Lord's plan for salvation." William Price Fox "There is in fact no Old South and no New. There is only the South. Fundamentally as it was in the beginning it is now, and if God please, it shall be evermore." Robert Cotterill The 'love' in country music is written lower case; there is little refined about it. It wells up within us unbidden, and is as thick as tar and just as unwieldy." Carol F. Wall "One Beale Street, where urban met rural, folk met jazz, and white met black, blues poured out." Denise Scott Brown "The Southerner talks music." Mark Twain "I still like black music best of all. That is the root of All-American music 'Southern black music." Phil Walden "The South is the only place we play were everybody can clap on the off-beat." Bruce Springsteen "The only reason people live up there, dear hearts, is because they have jobs there. Did you ever hear of anybody retiring to the north?" Brother Dave Gardner "The north isn't a place. Its just a direction out of the South." Roy Blount, Jr. "All Southerners go home sooner or later, even if in a box." Truman Capote Back to Dispatch Apr. 99 Table of Contents Back to Dispatch List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by HMGS Mid-South This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com