Best Confederate Quotes & Sayings

My position on how to address the Confederate flag is clear. In Florida, we acted, moving the flag from the state grounds to a museum, where it belonged. — Rick Santorum

Apparently, I was taking U.S. History again this year, which was the only history taught at Jackson, making the name redundant. I would be spending my second consecutive year studying the "War of Northern Aggression" with Mr. Lee, no relation. But as we all knew, in spirit Mr. Lee and the famous Confederate general were one and the same. Mr. Lee was one of the few teachers who actually hated me. Last year, on a dare from Link, I had written a paper called "The War of Southern Aggression," and Mr. Lee had given me a D. Guess the teachers actually did read the papers sometimes, after all. — Kami Garcia

I have a great-great-great-grandfather who was a Confederate cavalry colonel, and I still have his military composite photo on my wall. The chemicals in the photo tint have changed over the years to the point that he looks green. One of my family members apparently still has the piece of paper that listed every thing in his pocket when he got shot. — Anson Mount

I intend to talk about race during this election in the South because the Republicans have been talking about it since 1968 in order to divide us. And I'm going to bring us together. Because you know what? You know what? White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back ought to be voting with us and not them, because their kids don't have health insurance either and their kids need better schools too. — Howard Dean

I think the best way I can put it," Tom summarized, "was what I was once told that a Confederate prisoner said to his Union captor. The Yank said: 'Why do you fight us so hard, Reb?', and his prisoner replied: 'Because you are here, Yank'. — C.G. Faulkner

I desire my children to be educated south of the Mason Dixon line and always to retain right of domicile in the Confederate States. — J. E. B. Stuart

We have, for generations, been trying to be more inclusive of the word Southern. And a symbol like the confederate flag indicates white only are allowed into that world. And removing the Confederate flag from public view to the pages of history is long overdue. — William R. Ferris

And just think, fellow Southrons, what kind of a Confederate nation we could have, if after independence, politicians abandoned equivocation and spoke honestly and firmly on all issues? If they were to do their duty to God, nation, and people, there would be virtually no need for any form of federal litigation. — Charley Reese

My name is Natasha Trethewey, and I was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966, exactly 100 years to the day that Mississippi celebrated the first Confederate Memorial Day, April 26, 1866. — Natasha Trethewey

Before my troops reached the little city, and before the people of Fredericksburg knew that any part of the Confederate army was near, there was great excitement over the demand for surrender. — James Longstreet

Sometimes the bedsheet is a Confederate flag. I wonder how the Negro players feel about them. The worst part is that these things are hung by kids. Why the hell couldn't they let that stuff die with their grandfathers? These are not rebels who want something new. These are rebels who want to bring back the old. Doug — Jim Bouton

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

Two Confederate senators proposed a night attack on McClellan employing exotic tactics - "5000 [men] stripped naked to storm the camps of the enemy with the bayonet only & Kill everybody with clothes on. — William J. Cooper Jr.

A lot of unemployment, though. We've got two closed factories and a rotting shopping mall that went bankrupt before it ever opened. We're not far from Kentucky, which marks the unofficial border to the South, so one sees more than enough pickup trucks decorated with stickers of Confederate flags and slogans proclaiming their brand of truck is superior to all others. Lots of country music stations, lots of jokes that contain the word "nigger." A sewer system that occasionally backs up into the streets for some unknown reason. Lots and lots of stray dogs around, many with grotesque deformities. — David Wong

For black folks, the Confederate flag represents the same thing that the Nazi flag represents to the Jews. There is absolutely no difference when we look at it. Now, white folks try to explain it away like, 'Oh, it's OK.' But when you're black, it is not OK. It represents oppression and murder. — Ken Page

There were 315,000 slave owners in the Union Army (with 200,000 in the Confederate Army) and the men who walked away from the Union Army were adamantly opposed to freeing slaves. We cite these facts and recorded statistics to point out that the principal cause of the war was not the issue of slavery. — John Coleman

no person of foreign birth, not a citizen of the Confederate States, shall be allowed to vote for any officer, civil or political, State or Federal. — Confederate States Of America

Mass shootings are all part of a vast Left-wing conspiracy to undermine the 2nd Amendment and deprive your 6-year-old of his God-given right to bring a Bushmaster to class for "show and tell" ... The one he got from his psychotic, meth-addicted uncle's trailer while the latter was out getting the Confederate flag tattooed on his face. Remember, guns don't kill: the dimwits who insist EVERYONE should have the right to own 'em do. — Quentin R. Bufogle

The [Confederate] Flag is - literally - sewed division. People claim it means different things to different people, but it harkens back to the pro-slavery side of the war. — Greg Gutfeld

It wasn't that he was a Confederate. Everyone in Gatlin County was related to the wrong side in the War Between the States. We were used to that by now. It was like being born in Germany after World War II, being from Japan after Pearl Harbor, or America after Hiroshima. History was a bitch sometimes. You couldn't change where you were from. But still, you didn't have to stay there. You didn't have to stay stuck in the past, like the ladies in DAR, or the Gatlin Historical Society, or the Sisters. And you didn't have to accept that things had to be the way they were, like Lena. Ethan Carter Wate hadn't, and I couldn't, either. — Kami Garcia

First, the defenders of the Confederate cause were, almost without exception, Democrats. Coates cites many malefactors from Senator Jefferson Davis to Senator James Henry Hammond to Georgia Governor Joseph Brown. Yet while identifying these men as southerners and Confederates, Coates omits to identify them as Democrats. — Dinesh D'Souza

The Confederate government cupboards were practically bare: in recent months the purchasing orders for its agent James Bulloch in Liverpool had broadened from military supplies to include such ordinary items as "one dozen erasers," "two dozen memorandum books of different sizes, and 12 dozen best lead pencils. — Anonymous

I sorrowfully acknowledge that seven years ago ... I was wickedly manipulated by treacherous former friends and colleagues who victimized me with the aid of a female confederate. They conspired to betray me into a sexual encounter at a time of great stress in my marital life ... I was set up as part of a scheme to co-opt me and obtain some advantage for themselves over me in connection with their hope for position in the ministry. — Jim Bakker

The dangers which threaten us are twofold: First, from the Confederate forces, composed of men whose earnest convictions and reckless bravery it is idle to deny. — Robert Dale Owen

Respect whatever it is [ Confederate flag] that you have to respect, because it was a point in time, and put it in a museum. — Donald Trump

Stephens resumed speaking as the crowd quieted. He referred to one final "improvement" the Confederate Constitution had introduced, a brief but crucial clause that banned forever any "bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves." "The new Constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions - African slavery as it exists among us - the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization." This question, Stephens baldly admitted, "was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution."20 Stephens then referenced — Don H. Doyle

Louis Brandeis beloved uncle, Lewis Dembitz, was an ardent abolitionist. His mother was an abolitionist in Kentucky at a time when Brandeis remembered hearing the shot from the confederate soldiers after the second battle of Bull Run. Amazing to think that he heard that and I studied with one of his last law clerks in college. And that encapsulates almost all of American history. — Jeffrey Rosen

The very first act of the Confederate Government was to send commissioners to Washington to make terms of peace, and to establish relations of amity between the two sections. — Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II

I can see why many Southerners, black ones in particular, don't like the implication that Southernness and the Confederate heritage are one and the same, because they're not. On the other hand, there are people who want to extirpate that completely and want folks to spit on the graves of their ancestors. — John Shelton Reed

The great and complicated political reasons for secession, thundered about in Congress and in the state legislatures, were not their reasons, which were more like those expressed by a captive Confederate soldier, who was not a slaveholder, to his puzzled Union captors. "I'm fighting because you're down here," he said.30 — S.C. Gwynne

We stepped outside rather hurriedly and down the street to anonymous sanctuary among the buildings of San Francisco.
"Promise me till your dying day, you'll believe that a Mellon was a Confederate general. It's the truth. That God-damn book lies! There was a Confederate general in my family!"
"I promise," I said and it was a promise that was kept. — Richard Brautigan

You cannot be a true man until you learn to obey. — Robert E.Lee

In the Confederate Army, an officer was judged by stark courage alone, and this made it possible for the Confederacy to live four years. — Chesty Puller

The next great First Amendment battleground is just six inches high. It is a license plate bearing the Confederate flag. — Anonymous