Kansas State Quotes & Sayings

It will be just as easy for nations to get along in a republic of the world as it is for you to get along in the republic of the United States. Now when Kansas and Colorado have a quarrel over the water in the Arkansas river they don't call out the national guard in each state and go to war over it. They bring suit in the Supreme Court of the United States and abide by the decision. There isn't a reason in the world why we can't do that internationally. — Harry S. Truman

In 1991, though, began an uprising that would propel those reptilian Republicans from a tiny splinter group into the state's dominant political faction, that would reduce Kansas Democrats to third-party status, and that would wreck what remained of the state's progressive legacy. We are accustomed to thinking of the backlash as a phenomenon of the seventies (the busing riots, the tax revolt) or the eighties (the Reagan revolution); in Kansas the great move to the right was a story of the nineties, a story of the present. — Thomas Frank

You do not cut a check in the state of Kansas to John Doe, executioner. The executioner is paid in cash so there's no trail to him — George Plimpton

In England "The Day After," though unpopular with viewers, seems to have confirmed the average Englishman's mindless prejudice against Kansas. Shortly after the film portrayed that state being turned into an overused barbecue pit by nuclear weapons, support for British nuclear weapons rose a full percentage point. — Emmett Tyrrell

Nothing is eternally stable, and even Kansas isn't really in Kansas anymore. The earth is in a constant state of flux. — Simon Winchester

Denying women the right to end a pregnancy is the flip side of punishing women for conduct during pregnancy, and even if not punishing, monitoring. In the spring of 2014 a law was proposed in the Kansas state legislature that would require doctors to report every miscarriage, no matter how early in pregnancy. — Katha Pollitt

One of the more remarkable demonstrations of this resistance occurred in September 2013, when a group of parents, with the help of a conservative legal institute, filed suit against the Kansas State Board of Education. Their goal was to overturn the entire set of state science standards from kindergarten through twelfth grade, arguing that those standards gave students a "materialistic atheistic" worldview that was inimical to their religion. Just as this book went to press, the lawsuit was dismissed. — Jerry A. Coyne

I'm not saying these flying discs don't really exist, but nobody living in Kansas City has seen them and that's a dry state. — Jack Paar

As far as Wyatt Earp knew, it was not illegal to beat a horse. In the past few years, he'd worked as a part-time policeman in a string of Kansas cow towns. Each time he was sworn in, he made an effort to study the ordinances he was supposed to enforce, but he wasn't much of a reader. In Ellsworth, he asked a lawyer for some help. "Wyatt," the man told him, "the entire criminal code of the State of Kansas boils down to four words. Don't kill the customers. — Mary Doria Russell

After the Cougars' 19-15 Cotton Bowl victory over Kansas State We're the only team in NCAA history to win 14 games in a season. It was just a great experience and I can't say enough about it ... People don't know how difficult it is to get up for 15 games. — LaVell Edwards

I want to see this lady out the front gate and into her car and off the street and out of town and then removed from the county and then the whole state and finally relocated to the place they call Tornado Alley in Kansas. — Holly Goldberg Sloan

If there should prove to be one real, living Free State Democrat in Kansas, I suggest that it might be well to catch him and stuff and preserve his skin as an interesting specimen of that soon-to-be-extinct variety of the genus Democrat. — Abraham Lincoln

Where else but in America could a schoolteacher from Kansas City end up the governor of her adopted state? — Jane D. Hull

I am a basketball junkie, and as a product of the great basketball state of Kansas, I have watched many a ball game between the University of Kansas Jayhawks and the Tar Heels. — Sheri L. Dew

Ad astra per aspera. It's the Kansas state motto," he said to Roger and me, "To the stars through adversity — Morgan Matson

What's the total area, in square miles, of the state of Kansas?" he whispered. "Um, around 82,200; why? — John Green

But now that the vivid consciousness of an earlier state had come back to him, the Professor felt that life with this Kansas boy, little as there had been of it, was the realest of his lives, and that all the years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside. His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him. All these things had nothing to do with the person he was in the beginning. The — Willa Cather

The northern public immediately assumed that Douglas was handing Kansas to the South as another slave state because proslavery emigrants from Missouri were certain to dominate its politics. In the ensuing uproar the disintegrating Whig Party disappeared altogether, and a new antislavery Republican Party was born. — Norman K. Risjord

Sallie Mae sounds like a naive and barefoot hillbilly girl but in fact they are a ruthless and aggressive conglomeration of bullies located in a tall brick building somewhere in Kansas. I picture it to be the tallest building in that state and I have decided they hire their employees straight out of prison. — David Sedaris

She leaned her uninjured shoulder against his plump, furry behind and shoved while she bitched to herself, "Four years at the military academy, two years at Kansas State University, survival camp in the swamps of Alabama, more schooling in Florida, and then torture endurance training with the Mossad and all so I could heave a bear's ass into a helicopter. Unfreaking real. — Vonnie Davis

Yesterday the Supreme Court lifted the ban on same-sex marriage in Kansas. They didn't give a reason for the ruling, but then again when a state is famous for a Judy Garland musical about a rainbow and a wizard who comes out of a closet, do you really need an excuse? — Jimmy Fallon

Tom Jr. was steeped in Free Soil politics and was now chief justice of the Kansas State Supreme Court. — Robert L. O'Connell

President Obama's fight for rural America is personal. He was raised by a single mom and grandparents from Kansas. He hails from a farming state, Illinois. — Tom Vilsack

While it is not likely that Democrats will start winning statewide elections tomorrow in Alabama, South Carolina, Kansas, Wyoming, or Utah, they will never win if they don't plant a flag and start organizing. My own state of Vermont is a good example. Forty-five years ago, Vermont was one of the most Republican states in the country. Today, as a result of a lot of hard work by many people, it is one of the most progressive. It — Bernie Sanders

One voice was raised in dissent. A Springfield lawyer, a former member of Congress and longtime Whig named Abraham Lincoln, took up Douglas's defense of Kansas-Nebraska at the Illinois statehouse in Springfield the day after Douglas spoke at the state fair. In the course of a three-hour speech, Lincoln proceeded to tear Kansas-Nebraska and popular sovereignty to shreds. — Allen C. Guelzo

Colorado and Wyoming are America's highest states, averaging 6,800 feet and 6,700 feet above sea level. Utah comes in third at 6,100 feet, New Mexico, Nevada, and Idaho each break 5,000 feet, and the rest of the field is hardly worth mentioning. At 3,400 feet, Montana is only half as high as Colorado, and Alaska, despite having the highest peaks, is even further down the list at 1,900 feet. Colorado has more fourteeners than all the other U.S. states combined, and more than all of Canada too. Colorado's lowest point (3,315 feet along the Kansas border) is higher than the highest point in twenty other states. Rivers begin here and flow away to all the points of the compass. Colorado receives no rivers from another state (unless you count the Green River's' brief in and out from Utah).Wyoming's Wind River Range is the only mountain in North America that supplies water to all three master streams of the American West: Missouri, Colorado, and Columbia rivers. — Keith Meldahl