What are people for? —Wendell Berry

We shouldn’t care a bit who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Who musters a majority on Capitol Hill (it is, after all, merely a “hill”), nor who warms the benches of the Supreme Court. If we concern ourselves with what happens in Washington, we give credence to their fatuous claim that they are the center of the American polity. . . . —Michael Hill

It’s not to our credit to think that we began today and it’s not to our glory to think we end today. . . . You stick to your blood, son; there’s a fierceness in blood that can bind you up with a long community of life. —Stark Young

We are descended from a people whose government was founded on liberty; our glorious grandfathers of Great Britain made liberty the foundation of everything. . . . We draw that spirit of liberty from our British ancestors. —Patrick Henry

With what pretense of fairness, it is said, can you Americans object to the secession of the Southern States when your nation was founded on secession from the British Empire. —Cornhill Magazine, London, 1861

The last Western statesman died about a century ago, while our public men today are noteworthy solely for the unembarrassed corruption. . . . Intellectually and philosophically not one of them aspires to anything as lofty as mediocrity. —Franklin Sanders

New England! Where people get together to change the world! —New England Public Radio as heard by Prof. Don Livingston

The South has done more than any people on earth for the African race. —John Henry Hopkins, Episcopal Bishop of Vermont, 1863

. . . your parents inherited a dollar; they leave you a peso. —Bill Bonner

There’s not a dime’s worth of difference. —George C. Wallace

There are no great men, My Boy, only great committees. —older gowned academic to younger gowned academic (New Yorker cartoon)

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