Quotes & Sayings About The American South

Latin American Art is an operational term used to describe art actually made in the more than twenty countries that make up Latin America and that encompass Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. — Mari Carmen Ramirez

At the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York in 2012, just a fortnight after the murder of the American ambassador in Benghazi, President Obama talked about the YouTube video his administration were then still saying was behind the attacks. Talking about the excerpt ofa film called Innocence of Muslims, the President of the United States said, before the world's assembly, 'The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.' He didn't say why it 'must not' belong to them any more than it 'must not' belong to the South Park creators who made The Book of Mormon or the ageing Monty Python team who made The Life of Brian. But the question was left to dangle. — Douglas Murray

The Americas were a great laboratory of evolutionary experimentation, a place where animals and plants unknown in Africa and Asia had evolved and thrived. But no longer. Within 2,000 years of the Sapiens' arrival, most of these unique species were gone. According to current estimates, within that short interval, North America lost thirty-four out of its forty-seven genera of large mammals. South America lost fifty out of sixty. The sabre-tooth cats, after flourishing for more than 30 million years, disappeared, and so did the giant ground sloths, the oversized lions, native American horses, native American camels, the giant rodents and the mammoths. Thousands of species of smaller mammals, reptiles, birds and even insects and parasites also became extinct (when the mammoths died out, all species of mammoth ticks followed them to oblivion). — Yuval Noah Harari

[Farmer] went to dozens of American and Canadian universities and colleges, preaching his O for the P [Preferential Option for the Poor] gospel, and to South Africa, where he debated a World Bank official at an international AIDS conference. "Africans must learn to curb their sexual appetites," the banker remarked, and Farmer replied, "I want to talk about other bankers, not the World Bankers, but bankers in general. My suspicion is they're not getting a lot of sex, because they spend a lot of time screwing the poor. — Tracy Kidder

White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fete champetre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies. — Tom Robbins

The most sanctified figure in American historiography is, by no accident, the Great Saint of centralizing "democracy" and the strong unitary nation-state: Abraham Lincoln. And so didn't Lincoln use force and violence, and on a massive scale, on behalf of the mystique of the sacred "Union," to prevent the South from seceding? Indeed he did, and on the foundation of mass murder and oppression, Lincoln crushed the South and outlawed the very notion of secession (based on the highly plausible ground that since the separate states voluntarily entered the Union they should be allowed to leave). But not only that: for Lincoln created the monstrous unitary nation-state from which individual and local liberties have never recovered. — Murray N. Rothbard

Argentina and Brasil are both extremely good south american teams who'll play a central role at the worldcup. — Thomas Muller

The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don't know - Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel - the quality of philosophy. — Doris Lessing

In South Pasadena, artists were around but invisible somehow. Even though it was just a fifteen-minute drive from Downtown LA, it felt worlds apart. That suburban American experience can both protect and stunt you. I couldn't wait to move to New York to become the person I've always wanted to become. — Porochista Khakpour

The North has no interest in the particular Negro, but talks of justice for the whole. The South has not interest, and pretends none, in the mass of Negroes but is very much concerned about the individual. — Zora Neale Hurston

I grew up as a fifth-generation Jew in the American South, at the confluence of two great storytelling traditions. After graduating from Yale in the 1980s, I moved to Japan. For young adventure seekers like myself, the white-hot Japanese miracle held a similar appeal as Russia in 1920s or Paris in the 1950s. — Bruce Feiler

I think it is high time that Europe starts to understand that we do not rule the world anymore, and that some former European imperial powers can no longer impress their will on to others in far away places, and we must accept that football has moved away from being a European and South American sport: it has become the World Sport that billions of fans are excitedly following every week, everywhere in the world. — Sepp Blatter

Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of "white trash" in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of the native American people. — H.P. Lovecraft

Should one break in and free the animals? That is illegal, but the obligation to obey the law is not absolute. It was justifiably broken by those who helped runaway slaves in the American South, to mention only one possible parallel. — Peter Singer

If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue? — Martin Luther King Jr.

a South American mercenary who served as Inspector General of the Turkish forces in Armenia, reported that the Governor-General of the province had ordered the local authorities in Adil Javus 'to exterminate all Armenian males of twelve years of age and over'. — Niall Ferguson

The view ... from my apartment ... was the World Trade Center ... and now it's gone, they attacked it. This symbol of American ingenuity, and strength, and labor, and imagination and commerce, and it is gone. But you know what? You know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from the South of Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty. You can't beat that! — Jon Stewart

Unlike the Afghans and Iraqis, the South Korean people solidly supported the American military presence, which was part of a United Nations operation. — John Eisenhower

Exporting Church employees to Latin America masks a universal and unconscious fear of a new Church. North and South American authorities, differently motivated but equally fearful, become accomplices in maintaining a clerical and irrelevant Church. Sacralizing employees and property, this Church becomes progressively more blind to the possibilities of Sacralizing person and community. — Ivan Illich

John Lane has long been recognized as one of the South's finest poets and memoirists. This debut establishes him as one of our finest novelists as well. His poet's eye for detail seamlessly merges with a born storyteller's gift for narrative. Fate Moreland's Widow gives voice to those who endured one of the most painful and neglected chapters in American history. — Ron Rash

Because a superior fried-chicken restaurant is often the institutional extension of a single chicken-obsessed woman, I realize that, like a good secondhand bookstore or a bad South American dictatorship, it is not easily passed down intact. — Calvin Trillin

How could Lincoln reply to such comments, without offending abolitionists or frightening slave-owning Unionists from the Upper South? Placating words were likewise out of the question. A plea from Virginia suggesting Lincoln need do no more than assure Southerners they had the right to bring their property into all American territories reminded the dubious president-elect of an apt story. It concerned a little girl who begged her mother to let her play outside. The mother repeatedly said no, the child persisted, and the mother finally lost patience and gave her a whipping, "upon which," Lincoln chortled, "the girl exclaimed: 'Now, Ma. I can certainly run out. — Harold Holzer

History in the making is a very uncertain thing. It might be better to wait till the South American republic has got through withits twenty-fifth revolution before reading much about it. When it is over, some one whose business it is, will be sure to give you in a digested form all that it concerns you to know, and save you trouble, confusion, and time. If you will follow this plan, you will be surprised to find how new and fresh your interest in what you read will become. — Anna Brackett

The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women. White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women. — Ida B. Wells

Look, I grew up in, went to school in, and now live in the American South, and southern white women are interesting, complex and quirky, even the ones with racial anxieties. — Melissa Harris-Perry

Martin Luther King Jr's agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity. — Cornel West

The spectacular landscape circling the fortress supplies an essential backdrop, inspiring dreamers to wander its ruins for the sake of it; North American tourists, bound down by their practical world view, are able to place those members of the disintegrating tribes they may have seen in their travels among these once-living walls, unaware of the moral distance separating them, since only the semi-indigenous spirit of the South American can grasp the subtle differences. — Che Guevara

Be careful of living your life based only on faith and signs, or you might find yourself standing in a South American jungle holding a glass of Kool-aid. Commonsense is the foundation of any good testimony. — Shannon L. Alder

The first book by an African American I read was Carl T. Rowan's memoir, Go South to Sorrow. I found it on the bookshelf at the back of my fifth-grade classroom, an adult book. I can remember the quality of the morning on which I read. It was a sunlit morning in January, a Saturday morning, cold, high, empty. I sat in a rectangle of sunlight, near the grate of the floor heater in the yellow bedroom. And as I read, I became aware of warmth and comfort and optimism. I was made aware of my comfort by the knowledge that others were not, are not, comforted. Carl Rowan at my age was not comforted. — Richard Rodriguez

Maybe this is just some stupid romantic South American idea, but I need you to understand-darling, for you, I am even willing to suffer. Whatever pain happens to us in the future, I accept it already, just for the pleasure of being with you now. Let's enjoy this time. It's marvelous. Felipe-Eat, Pray, Love — Elizabeth Gilbert

Deep-sea-fishing boat, which they would buy, man themselves, and rent to vacationers - this though neither had ever skippered a canoe or hooked a guppy. Then, too, there was quick money to be made chauffeuring stolen cars across South American borders. ("You get paid five hundred bucks a trip," or so Perry had read somewhere.) But of the many replies he might have made, he chose to remind Dick of the fortune awaiting them on Cocos Island, a land speck off the coast of Costa Rica. "No fooling, Dick," Perry said. "This is authentic. I've got a map. I've got the whole history. It was buried there back in 1821 - Peruvian bullion, jewelry. Sixty million dollars - that's what they — Truman Capote

Although the Civil War was an apocalyptic success in the sense that it brought an end to nearly a century of struggle and broken hopes regarding the ultimate extinction of African American slavery, it also combined new freedoms, as in other major revolutions, with shock, breakdown, trauma, and tragedy. Neither desired nor accurately anticipated by leaders in the North and South, the war dramatized the failure of the whole American system of political negotiation and compromise that had never weakened the institution of slavery but had supported democratic government for whites for over eighty years. < ... > Moreover, the long-term outcome of this revolutionary decision would be determined within a context of sectional hate and bitterness, political revenge, and competing presssures for reconciliation, reunion, and forgiveness. — David Brion Davis

I think I would like to see more roles for South Asian performers that are more inclusive and part of the American Diaspora, the American tapestry, perhaps the way that African American and Hispanic roles have developed. — Aasif Mandvi

Understanding America for the Non-American Black: American Tribalism In America, tribalism is alive and well. There are four kinds - class, ideology, region, and race. First, class. Pretty easy. Rich folk and poor folk. Second, ideology. Liberals and conservatives. They don't merely disagree on political issues, each side believes the other is evil. Intermarriage is discouraged and on the rare occasion that it happens, is considered remarkable. Third, region. The North and the South. The two sides fought a civil war and tough stains from that war remain. The North looks down on the South while the South resents the North. Finally, race. There's a ladder of racial hierarchy in America. White is always on top, specifically White — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In the South American rainforest, there is a tribe called the Desana, who see the world as a fixed quantity of energy that flows between all creatures. Every birth must therefore engender a death, and every death brings forth another birth. This way, the energy of the world remains complete.
When they hunt for food, the Desana know the animals they kill will leave a hole in the spiritual well. But that hole will be filled, they believe, by the Desana hunters when they die. Were there no men dying, there would be no birds or fish being born. I like this idea. Morrie likes it, too. The closer he gets to goodbye, the more he seems to feel we are all creatures in the same forest. What we take, we must replenish.
"It's only fair," he says. — Mitch Albom

I started collecting aerial photographs of Native American and South Pacific architecture; only the African ones were fractal. And if you think about it, all these different societies have different geometric design themes that they use. So Native Americans use a combination of circular symmetry and fourfold symmetry. — Ron Eglash

Making wine and drinking wine is not new to African Americans and others in the Diaspora. South Africa has a three-century history in growing, harvesting and distilling grapes as wine. The entire continent of Africa has a history in wine-making. In this country, slaves cultivated the vineyards owned by Thomas Jefferson and other vintners. — Andre Hueston Mack

Governments of rich countries spend some $6bn of tax money a year on disaster relief and development aid overseas, while each new earthquake, famine or tidal wave can attract 1,000 aid organisations, from the United Nations Children's Fund and Oxfam to the 'Jesus Brigades' of the American south and other charitable adventurers. — James Buchan

During the day on Monday, Washington time, the airport at Saigon came under persistent rocket as well as artillery fire and was effectively closed. The military situation in the area deteriorated rapidly. I therefore ordered the evacuation of all American personnel remaining in South Vietnam. — Gerald R. Ford

Especially appealing to the planter elite was the conservatism of the American Revolution. Indeed, according to their reading, it had been so conservative that it hardly deserved the title of revolution at all. The goal had been simple political independence, and the issue of home rule had not expanded to include the dangerous question of who should rule at home. The men who made the revolution had maintained control in victory. — James L. Roark

Without the three-fifths rule, there wouldn't have been a Constitution of the United States - not one that governed the American South, at any rate - because the South wouldn't have ratified it. — Timothy Noah

I have often been mildly amused when I think that the great American novel was not written about New England or Chicago. It was written about a white whale in the South Pacific. — James A. Michener

The mother killing her two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we have to have change. I think people want to change and the only way you get change is to vote Republican. — Newt Gingrich

By all means, stay," Anne said. "Have a seat. We'll take care of you next."
"Yeah, see, I think someone else is going to be on trial next." Baring my teeth at her in a grin I pulled out my file folder. "I've got some interesting reading here. And I even brought copies for everyone so you don't have to share."
A distinguished-looking South American man on the end shook his head. "What is this? Another farce?"
"No, but bonus points for using a funny word. You really want to read what I have here. Anne, you'll be especially interested, since you have a starring role."
"Enough. Rhia - "
Reth quickly flicked his wrist at her; her mouth kept moving, but no sound came out. It was one of the most satisfying things I'd ever seen. Sure, that trick had sucked when he used it on me, but I wholly approved of it now. — Kiersten White

I couldn't miss the irony, not as a forty-two-year-old native of the segregated South, still fighting to earn respect in the color-conscious world of American business. How often had my parents and grandparents, other family members and friends, and I myself been directed to the back door of a bus, a restaurant, or a theater because we were considered second class, even after paying a first-class price for service! But that night we were treated to courtesies that even President Nixon could not enjoy: entering through the lobby, approaching the front desk, quietly registering, and being assisted to our room by the highly trained wait staff. A familiar portion of a Bible verse came to mind. The last shall be first and the first last (Matt. 20:16). — John Barfield

I'm a third-culture child. It's an interesting concept. Having an American father, a South American mother, born in England, grew up in Hong Kong, went to school in Europe - it makes me a third-culture child, which means you take on the culture of the place where you live. So I'm very adaptable. — Marie-Chantal Claire

Ethan got some books out of an old trunk. They were history books, some passed down from his great-grandfather Tom through his grandfather Jeb and father Andrew. Ethan expected that he'd pass them on to his own child, one day. History and family trees had always been very important to the Fortner family. — C.G. Faulkner

Most East Asians speak and dream in the language of the Han Empire. No matter what their origins, nearly all the inhabitants of the two American continents, from Alaska's Barrow Peninsula to the Straits of Magellan, communicate in one of four imperial languages: Spanish, Portuguese, French or English. Present-day Egyptians speak Arabic, think of themselves as Arabs, and identify wholeheartedly with the Arab Empire that conquered Egypt in the seventh century and crushed with an iron fist the repeated revolts that broke out against its rule. About 10 million Zulus in South Africa hark back to the Zulu age of glory in the nineteenth century, even though most of them descend from tribes who fought against the Zulu Empire, and were incorporated into it only through bloody military campaigns. — Yuval Noah Harari

There's some homophobia within black community, but there's some strong homophobia throughout the whole of American society as well, particularly throughout the South to a degree, whether white or black. And since many of us migrated from the South, that could be a strong connection along those lines. — Otis Moss III

From seaport to seaport, papers accumulate on the captain's desk. "Paperwork has become the bane of this job," he says. "If a ship doesn't have a good copying machine, it isn't seaworthy. The more ports, the more papers. South American paperwork is worse than the paperwork anywhere else in the world but the Arab countries and Indonesia." Deliberately, he allows the pile on his desk to rise until a deep roll on a Pacific swell throws it to the deck and scatters it from bulkhead to bulkhead. This he interprets as a signal that the time has come to do paperwork. The paper carpet may be an inch deep, but he leaves it where it fell. Bending over, he picks up one sheet. He deals with it: makes an entry, writes a letter - does whatever it requires him to do. Then he bends over and picks up another sheet. This goes on for a few days until, literally, he has cleared his deck. The — John McPhee

It is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color-prejudice is the sole cause of their social condition, nor for the white South to reply that their social condition is the main cause of prejudice. They both act as reciprocal cause and effect, and a change in neither alone will bring the desired effect. Both must change, or neither can improve to any great extent."(p.88) ... "Only by a union of intelligence and sympathy across the color-line in this critical period of the Republic shall justice and right triumph, — W.E.B. Du Bois

A diplomatic passport for a Tal Zahavi, with a current photo of Yael-1. The same birth date as in the other passport. The interior must have had fifty entry stamps for European and South American countries, plus the U.S., Japan, and South Korea. The woman traveled a lot. — John Sandford

The South must put aside the illusion that she will one day be accepted as an equal in this Northern-dominated union. The South must put aside the illusion that the current government is the legitimate outgrowth of the original American Constitutional Republic. These illusions are used by our conquerors to bind the South to this unequal union. — James Ronald Kennedy

As she reached for the plates, she wondered if her life could get any weirder. Her life savings had been handed over to a band of South American guerrillas, she had a phony engagement to a famous football player, she was homeless and jobless, and she was making breakfast for Mad Jack Patriot. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

You know what the lowest rated episode we ever had was? Where Captain Kirk kissed Uhuru - a white man kissing an African-American woman. All the stations in the American South - in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana - refused to air it. And so our ratings plummeted. — George Takei

The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie. — James Dickey

She remembered reading how the American South had often compared itself to Rome back before the Civil War. In the old days their society had been all about impressive architecture, honor, and codes of chivalry. And on the evil side, it had also been about slavery. Rome had slaves, some Southerners had argued, so why shouldn't we?
Annabeth shivered. She loved the architecture here. The houses and the gardens were very beautiful, very Roman. But she wondered why beautiful things had to be wrapped up with evil history. Or was it the other way around? Maybe the evil history made it necessary to build beautiful things, to mask the darker aspects. — Rick Riordan

In addition to localized neural networks, hallucinogenic drugs have been documented to trigger such preternatural experiences, such as the sense of floating and flying stimulated by atropine and other belladonna alkaloids. These can be found in mandrake and jimsonweed and were used by European witches and American Indian shamans, probably for this very purpose.32 Dissociative anesthetics such as the ketamines are also known to induce out-of-body experiences. Ingestion of methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA) may bring back long-forgotten memories and produce the feeling of age regression, while dimethyltryptamine (DMT) - also known as "the spirit molecule" - causes the dissociation of the mind from the body and is the hallucinogenic substance in ayahuasca, a drug taken by South American shamans. People who have taken DMT report "I no longer have a body," and "I am falling," "flying," or "lifting up. — Michael Shermer

That strain of anti-monopoly crusading egalitarianism really runs throughout American history from [Tomas] Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson, that finds its apotheosis in [Louis] Brandeis, continues through the New Deal, but then it sort of peters out in the '60s because progressives in particular become more interested in extending equality to minorities, and women, and other excluded groups, and little more suspicious of these old white guys, often from the south, who were crusaders against monopolies. — Jeffrey Rosen

I myself am a very, very peaceful person. Throughout our history, from our own American revolution to the resistance against apartheid in South Africa, to labor strikes in the US, people have resorted to violence to achieve a more progressive society, from time to time. — Tom Morello

A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is "South Park" - the hugely popular American cartoon show - and the things that the "South Park" creators have created, like "The Book Of Mormon," the Broadway musical. If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in "The Book Of Mormon," right? It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries. — Adam Gopnik

1845, when the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society declared that any slave owner would be disqualified from consideration for missionary service, Baptist churches in the South seceded and formed the Southern Baptist Convention so that members would not have to choose between their slaves and their calling to be missionaries. — Robert P. Jones

The Irish were poor, but not enslaved. He had come here to hack away at the ropes that held American slavery in place. Sometimes it withered him just to keep his mind steady. He was aware that the essence of proper intelligence was the embrace of contradiction. And the recognition of complexity was to be balanced against the need for simplicity. He was still a slave. Fugitive. If he returned to Boston he could be kidnapped at any time, taken south, strapped to a tree, whipped. His owners. They would make a spectacle of his fame. They had tried to silence him for many years already. No longer. He had been given a chance to speak out against what had held him in chains. And he would continue to do so until the links lay in pieces at his feet. — Colum McCann

Setting aside embassies, consulates and military bases, Rose Atoll of American Samoa is the southernmost point of U.S. controlled territory. Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and half a dozen other islands are all further south than Ka Lae.
While Ka Lae is not the southermost point of the United States, it is the southernmosr point of the fifty states. — John Richard Stephens

The speech fascinated him. His ear caught the rhythm of it and he noted their idioms and worked some of them into his patter. He had found the reason behind the peculiar, drawling language of the old carny hands - it was a composite of all the sprawling regions of the country. A language which sounded Southern to Southerners, Western to Westerners. It was the talk of the soil and its drawl covered the agility of the brains that poured it out. It was a soothing, illiterate, earthy language. — William Lindsay Gresham

Elvira, as befitting one who represented a magazine, registered first and demanded a room and bath. She pronounced it "bawth." The clerk seemed aghast at the request. However, in that hotel, any lady got whatever she asked for. It was her unquestioned right, as a lady. But there was no bath in the hotel, nor running water for that matter. The clerk faltered out something about a nice bowl and pitcher in every room, and said he thought they could provide a foot tub. He was sorry; there was no bath. Elvira couldn't grasp the situation. She thought the clerk was stupid--a hotel without a bath was a contradiction in terms. When she explained that she wanted something for complete immersion, the clerk seemed embarrassed. At his wits' end, he suggested (blushing like fire) that the colored boy could bring up the hog scalder. — Beatrice Fairfax

Even men who were engaged in organizing debt-serf cultivation and debt-serf industrialism in the American cotton districts, in the old rubber plantations, and in the factories of India, China, and South Italy, appeared as generous supporters of and subscribers to the sacred cause of individual liberty. — H.G.Wells

I married an American. He was from the Pacific Northwest but went to law school in the South, so I was living in Virginia and North Carolina. — Sarah Hall

I've always admired President Chavez for standing up to imperialism and the meddling of the American government in South America. — Cindy Sheehan

This boa, the American columns, are being besieged between Basra and other towns north, west, south and west of Basra. The Americans are the people who are under siege. — Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

The beautifully composed imagery of '12 Years a Slave' underscores the savagery of its subject, which is an American South not of knights and ladies but obscene values and a grotesque pageantry, every gorgeous shot of the languid landscape radiating toxicity like a hyperlush blossom that's poison to the touch. — Steve Erickson

By the time she a year old Mae Mobley following me around everwhere I go ... .Miss Leefolt, she'd narrow up her eyes at me like I done something wrong, unhitch that crying baby off my foot. I reckon that's the risk you run, letting somebody else raise you chilluns — Kathryn Stockett

For more than a decade, the United States had been giving large-scale military aid to the French colonialists, and then to the American-installed but authoritarian South Vietnamese government, to fight nationalists and communists in Vietnam. More than 23,000 U.S. military advisers were there by the end of 1964, occasionally engaging in combat. On the other side of the world, the American public knew and cared little about the guerrilla war. In fact, few knew exactly where Vietnam was. Nevertheless, people were willing to go along when their leaders told them that action was essential to resist communist aggression. — Edward S. Greenberg

Though many strive to hide their human libidinousness from themselves and each other, being a force of nature, it breaks through. Lots of uptight, proper Americans were scandalized by the way Elvis moved his hips when he sang "rock and roll." But how many realized what the phrase rock and roll meant? Cultural historian Michael Ventura, investigating the roots of African-American music, found that rock 'n' roll was a term that originated in the juke joints of the South. Long in use by the time Elvis appeared, Ventura explains the phrase "hadn't meant the name of a music, it meant 'to fuck.' 'Rock,' by itself, has pretty much meant that, in those circles, since the twenties at least." By the mid-1950s, when the phrase was becoming widely used in mainstream culture, Ventura says the disc jockeys "either didn't know what they were saying or were too sly to admit what they knew. — Christopher Ryan

This was the first Memorial Day [Monday, May 1st, 1865]. African Americans invented Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina. What you have there is Black Americans recently freed from slavery announcing to the world with their flowers, their feet, and their songs what the war had been about. What they basically were creating was the Independence Day of a Second American Revolution. — David W. Blight

I did do an American pilot, but it wasn't shot in America, it was shot in South Africa. It was called 'The Philanthropist,' and it was for NBC. — Dominique McElligott

Segregation in the American South was bankrolled by the wealthy eugenicist from the Northeast, Wickliffe Draper. — A.E. Samaan

Country music is the combination of African and European folk songs coming together and doing a little waltz right here in the American south. They came together at some cotillion, and somebody snuck a black person into the room, and he danced with a white lady, and music was born. — Ketch Secor

In contrast, Western historians, and those in South Korea, say the North attacked the South on June 25, 1950. Both sides agree that after the war began, the North Korean Army captured Seoul in three days and pushed as far south as Pusan before American troops arrived to drive back the North Koreans nearly as far north as the border to China. — Sheryl WuDunn

When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now
where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists. — Doris Lessing

There was a lot of feeling that with an African-American president, life on the South Side of Chicago would be radically different. — Mark Kirk

I have real fears for Cuba based on the South American experience. Where you have had such a stern regime, as Fidel's [Castro], there is no culture of politics. — John Gimlette

The South Pacific was once the playground for ship-sick European sailors. Then it became the roistering barricade of the last great pirates. Next it was the longed-for escape from the canyons of New York. Then the unwilling theatre for an American military triumph. But now it has become the meeting ground for Asia and America. — James A. Michener

To begin with, I've always known that I was a little bit different. And, I have a lot of relatives who own farms. I grew up in the American South where political issues and issues of justice were at the forefront. What I do now is a combination of all these factors. — Cary Fowler

I grew up in Synagogue in the boys' choir. We didn't listen to music in the house; only at temple. Then I went to a mostly African American high school on the South Side of Chicago and joined a gospel choir. — Mandy Patinkin

Dear Non-Black American,
when you comes to the United States, you become black.No matter of your origin. Stop saying you are Liberian, Jamaican, Belizean, Nigerian,
South African or Ghanaian. White America doesn't care about all that bull, that's why on the work application it doesn't give you the option to say Ghanaian or Jamaican, it says "African American. — Henry Johnson Jr

The major economies are not American anymore. They are Asian and South American. — David Douglas Duncan

With the defeat of the Reich and pending the emergence of the Asiatic, the African and, perhaps, the South American nationalisms, there will remain in the world only two Great Powers capable of confronting each other-the United States and Soviet Russia. The laws of both history and geography will compel these two Powers to a trial of strength, either military or in the fields of economics and ideology. (2nd April 1945) — Adolf Hitler

The South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know. — W.E.B. Du Bois

When we rise in the morning ... at the table we drink coffee which is provided to us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African; before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half the world. — Martin Luther King Jr.

You can go to Japan, China, all the European, African, Arab, and South American countries, and man, they know me. I can't name a nation where they don't know me. — Muhammad Ali

There were a few exotics among them - some South American boys, sons of Argentine beef barons, one or two Russians, and even a Siamese prince, or someone who was described as a prince. Sim had two great ambitions. One was to attract titled boys to the school, and the other was to train up pupils to win scholarships at public schools, above all Eton. He did, towards the end of my time, succeed in getting hold of two boys with real English titles. One of them, I remember, was a wretched little creature, almost an albino, peering upwards out of weak eyes, with a long nose at the end of which a dew drop always seemed to be trembling. Sam always gave these boys their titles when mentioning them — George Orwell

Since 1877 the driving force of American politics hasn't primarily been a class struggle or tension between agrarian and commercial interests, or even between competing partisan ideologies, although each has played a role. Ultimately the determinative political struggle has been a clash between shifting coalitions of ethnoregional nations, one invariably headed by the Deep South, the other by Yankeedom. — Colin Woodard

Now even the American command is under siege. We are hitting it from the north, east, south and west. We chase them here and they chase us there. But at the end we are the people who are laying siege to them. And it is not them who are besieging us. — Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

The first and most natural way of lighting the houses of the American colonists, both in the North and South, was by the pine-knots of the fat pitch-pine, which, of course, were found everywhere in the greatest plenty in the forests. — Alice Morse Earle

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back. — H.L. Mencken

When we say Afro American, we include everyone in the Western Hemisphere of African descent. South America is America. Central America is America. South America has many people in it of African descent. — Malcolm X

The American craving for illegal, mind-altering, addictive chemicals provides a steady flow of American capital through the Texas border into Mexico and South America. Basically, the drug traffic is uncontainable as long as its U.S. market exists, but newspapers and other media virtuously trumpet feel-good headlines about "record drug busts" and arrests while the drug trade continues unabated. — William Earl Maxwell

I again flourished my papers: "Here're my credentials from the Coalition Administration."
The American scrutinized the papers, shook his head in amazement, and smiled. "A South African," he said. "You're sure a long way from home." He radioed through for instructions and indicated that I should bring my hired car up to the side of the roadblock and wait. — Lawrence Anthony

He greeted me in his usual attire - pajama pants. "Hey stranger!" he said, hugging me for a few long seconds. "I've already set up the board. Can I get you some rose"
I nodded, overwhelmingly relieved to be with another human being - even if he was really a wolf in grandma's clothing. Or was he just a wolf in wolf's clothing? After all, he wore pajamas ... Hmmm. I contemplated all this as he poured me a glass of wine.
"Mind if I smoke?" he asked as he lit up a joint and motioned me over to the sleek brown couch. Italian, of course.
Through the three windows that faced south, north, and west, I saw the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island, where I had paid to have my parents' names inscribed in the immigrant wall of honor. Some American Dream this was! — Inna Swinton