South Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

You never see a positive drug story on the news. They always have the same LSD story. You've all seen it: "Today a young man on acid … thought he could fly … jumped out of a building … what a tragedy!" What a dick. He's an idiot. If he thought he could fly, why didn't he take off from the ground first? Check it out? You don't see geese lined up to catch elevators to fly south; they fly from the fucking ground. He's an idiot. He's dead. Good! We lost a moron? Fucking celebrate. There's one less moron in the world.

The tourist archipelagoes of my South
are prisons too, corruptible, and though
there is no harder prison than writing verse,
what's poetry, if it is worth its salt,
but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth?

In South Carolina, the spirit and the links of social life are aristocratic to a degree which I cannot approve of, however much I may like certain people there. And aristocracy there has this in common with aristocracies of the present time; that, while the aristocratic virtues and greatness have vanished, merely the pretension remains.

Frederika Bremer

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.

Robert Penn Warren

Our interests require that Egypt should remain what it is, an integral part of the Turkish empire. We do not want it or wish it for ourselves, any more than any rational man with an estate in the North of England and a residence in the South would have wished to possess the inns on the North Road.

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston

It breaks my heart to see (I can't interfere or do anything at my age) what is happening in our country today - this terrible strike of the best men in the world, who beat the Kaiser's army and beat Hitler's army, and never gave in. Pointless, endless. We can't afford that kind of thing. And then this growing division which the noble Lord who has just spoken mentioned, of a comparatively prosperous south, and an ailing north and midlands. That can't go on.

Harold Macmillan

Who knows but that England may revive in New South Wales when it has sunk in Europe.

Australia, n. A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.

It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.

This period has brought about the greatest, most terrible, and most destructive migration of modern times, a movement of men, women, and children trekking across Europe in flight from other men, women, and children... Whether they go north, south, east, or west, they head toward poverty.

The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,
And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.

William Cullen Bryant

Bangladesh is a majority Muslim country, with a significant, if shrinking Hindu minority—about 25-30% at the time of Partition in 1947, and less than 9% in 2003. The textbooks in Bangladesh are not based on an anti-Indian bias as are state sponsored textbooks in Pakistan. The social studies curriculum in Pakistan is premised on creating a national identity that is distinct from India, whereas Bangladeshi textbooks reflect a more pan-South Asian perspective, though Bengal-centric.

The general intellectual level of South Florida is somewhere just above "functionally retarded".

South America must have lain alongside Africa and formed a unified block which was split in two in the Cretaceous; the two parts must then have become increasingly separated over a period of millions of years like pieces of a cracked ice floe in water.

Up to this time the argument of the abolitionists, who since 1833 had been storming the national conscience — for they knew the real citadel of a nation — with the assertion that slavery was an absolute wrong, had been met by the reply, 'Yes, yes; we know all about that. Of course it's a great wrong. The South agrees to that. It's dreadful sorry about it — but it's got the nasty thing, and it says if we'll only let it alone it will settle itself. Slavery is one of those things that work out themselves. The more you talk the worse it is. Besides, it's their own affair; we've nothing to do with it. Let 'em alone! Let 'em alone!'

George William Curtis

The Negro. The South. These are details. The real story is the universal one of men who destroy the souls of other men (and in the process destroy themselves) for reasons neither really understands. It is the story of the persecuted, the defrauded, the feared, and detested. I could have been a Jew in Germany, a Mexican in a number of states, or a member of any 'inferior' group. Only the details would have differed. The story would be the same.

John Howard Griffin

O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South,
Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves,
And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

By the time I came to England at the age of sixteen I'd seen a great variety of landscapes. I think the English landscape was the only landscape I'd come across which didn't mean anything, particularly the urban landscape. England seemed to be very dull, because I'd been brought up at a much lower latitude — the same latitude as the places which are my real spiritual home as I sometimes think: Los Angeles and Casablanca. I'm sure this is something one perceives — I mean the angle of light, density of light. I'm always much happier in the south — Spain, Greece — than I am anywhere else. The English one, oddly enough, didn't mean anything. I didn't like it, it seemed odd. England was a place that was totally exhausted.

You had better — all you people at the South — prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared the better. You may dispose of me very easily, — I am nearly disposed by now; but this question is still to be settled, — this negro question I mean; the end of that is not yet.

John Brown (abolitionist)

[Apartheid law in South Africa] appears to be a clear and even extreme instance of that discrimination between different individuals which seems to me to be incompatible with the reign of liberty. The essence of what I said [in The Constitution of Liberty] was really the fact that the laws under which government can use coercion are equal for all responsible adult members of that society. Any kind of discrimination — be it on grounds of religion, political opinion, race, or whatever it is — seems to be incompatible with the idea of freedom under the law. Experience has shown that separate never is equal and cannot be equal.

Friedrich Hayek

All gone. Zelazny was one of the first times I looked at something I had had familiarity with to find the spot where the memory should have been empty, replaced by a scrawled "Moved South for the Fishing" sign. Calculus was another loss. It was quite upsetting to reach for a skill and find nothing.

It is fair to say that even in present-day conditions, Christian missions have been in the vanguard of initiating social services provided for us. Our progress in this field has been in spite of, and not mainly because of, the government. In this, the church in South Africa, though belatedly, seems to be awakening to a broader mission of the church in its ministry among us. It is beginning to take seriously the words of its Founder who said: "I came that they might have life and have it more abundantly."

Of the South Pole:

Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have labored to it without the reward of priority.

Robert Falcon Scott

Equal rights for all civilized men south of the Zambesi.

Eastern European diplomats in the early 1960s were aghast at the North Koreans' assertions that a nuclear confrontation was nothing to be afraid of, and that the time had come for another invasion of the South. It is by no means certain that this sort of adventurist thinking has been abandoned. In a propaganda novel set in 1993, Kim Jong Il and his generals regard a likely American air strike on the Yongbyeon nuclear facility as the perfect opportunity for a "sacred war" (seongjeon) of reunification.

Brian Reynolds Myers