Old Alabama Quotes & Sayings

Beyonce, to me, doesn't have a f
king Purple Rain, but she's the biggest thing on Earth. How can you be that big without at least one Sweet Home Alabama or Old Time Rock & Roll? ... People are like, 'Beyonce's hot. Got a nice f
king a
.' I'm like, 'Cool, I like skinny white chicks with big t
s.' Doesn't really f
king do much for me. — Kid Rock

In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don't. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color "criminals" and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination - employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service - are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. — Michelle Alexander

He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper's wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power. — William James

Maybe Artist is hard job. It is not for me to say. But I would be surprised if it was as hard a job as Rock Thrower. Throwing rocks is not so easy. For example, five years ago, one of my shoulders detached from my arm when I was throwing a boulder off a cliff. And two years after that, the other shoulder detached also. I can still throw rocks. But now, when I throw them, I am screaming. Not just once in a while, but constantly. Every time I throw a rock I am screaming, so loud. I do not always realize I am screaming - it is just part of my life. Usually, by sundown, I have no voice left. It is gone, you understand, because I was screaming so much from the pain of throwing rocks. Another thing is that sometimes I fall off the cliff, which is a bad situation. — Simon Rich

A business without marketing is dead. — Paul Cookson

The government would have preferred not to take a stand, but the constant presence of the Israeli-Arab conflict on our television screens made it an issue that could no longer be avoided. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

The farm is one field to the east of the railroad track that used to connect New Orleans with Chicago. The track runs beside Highway 45, an old U.S. route that unites Chicago with Mobile, Alabama. — Bobbie Ann Mason

Oh! Moon of Alabama We now must say good-bye We've lost our good old mama And must have whiskey Oh, you know why! — Bertolt Brecht

Plagiarism has been around far longer than the Internet. In fact, I had a poem published in 'Seventeen' magazine when I was 15 years old. About a year later I was informed that there was a girl who used that same poem to win a statewide poetry competition in Alabama. It took months for people to put together that this had happened. — Megan McCafferty

The children of Birmingham did not really die in the State of Alabama, however, because Alabama is a state of mind, and in the minds of the [white] men who rule Alabama, those children had never lived [ ... ] their blood is on so many hands, that history will weep in the telling ... and it is not new blood. It is old, so very old. — Roger Ebert

Benjamin Fitzpatrick was admitted to the practice of law in Alabama in 1821. Within five years, having participated in some law suits regarding conflicting property claims among slaveholders, he had built up a clientele sufficiently broad to allow him to begin acquiring slaves. In 1826 Fitzpatrick purchased three slaves for a thousand dollars; in 1827 he bought a fifteen-year-old boy for four hundred dollars. The following year he spent over five hundred dollars on a seventeen-year-old girl and her six-month-old son, $975 on a sixteen-year-old girl along with a twelve-year-old mulatto and a nine-year-old boy. Later in 1828, he added a boy named Peter and a woman named Betsey — James Oakes

With relief they wrapped their heads in rags, and their breasts in flannel; eased their feet into felt. They were through with lust and lactation, beyond tears and terror. They alone could walk the roads of Mississippi, the lanes of Georgia, the fields of Alabama unmolested. They were old enough to be irritable when and where they chose, tired enough to look forward to death, disinterested enough to accept the idea of pain while ignoring the presence of pain. They were, in fact and at last, free. — Toni Morrison

The combat environment has the effect of flattening out civilian identities. If you're young or old, or a graduate from Harvard or the son of a farmer from Alabama, or if you're gay or straight or good-looking or ugly: none of those things matters much in combat, as long as you can conform to the group expectations. — Sebastian Junger

In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance; from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities. — Willa Cather

Emmett Till's murder" instilled in Anne Moody, a fourteen-year-old black girl from Alabama, "the fear of being killed just because I was black." It was the senselessness of the murder of the fourteen-year-old boy that she couldn't get out of her mind, she was to say. "I didn't know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought. — Robert A. Caro

Always keep your eyes open. Keep watching. Because whatever you can see can inspire you. — Grace Coddington

When politics is elevated over business, economic disaster follows. — James Cook

As the saying goes: time is money- so give me some money to think. — Raymond Queneau

I am in a two-stoplight town in the Alabama hill country, in the heart of the Bible Belt and Crimson Tide football mania, listening to an old-fashioned, heated argument between Cubans like the ones I've heard in Little Havana in Miami, but the moment very quickly loses its sense of strangeness and cultural dissonance. This is what America is like now
North America, I mean, the United States. The craziness of cubanos and mexicanos and guatemaltecos can find you just about anywhere — Hector Tobar