"Formerly, the purchase of Texas by our Government, for the purpose of bestowing it as a gift upon our colored population, was a favorite opinion of ours; but we have settled down into the belief, that the object is neither practicable nor expedient. In the first place, it is not probable that the Congress would make the purchase; nor, secondly, is it likely that the mass of our colored people would remove without some compulsory process; nor, thirdly, would it be safe or convenient to organise them as a distinct nation among us,—an imperium in imperio. The fact is, it is time to repudiate all colonization schemes, as visionary and unprofitable; all those, we mean, which have for their design the entire separation of the blacks from the whites. We must take our free colored and slave inhabitants as we find them—recognise them as countrymen who have extraordinary claims upon our charities—give them the advantages of education—respect them as members of one great family, who may be made useful in society and honorable in reputation. This is our view of the subject."

"Thermopylae had her messenger of defeat—the Alamo had none."

"I wish for the people of Texas, as I do for the people of the entire South, that they may go on developing their resources, and become great and powerful, and in their prosperity forget, as the worthy Mayor expressed it, that there is a boundary between the North and South. I am sure we will all be happier and much more prosperous when the day comes that there shall be no sectional feeling."

"The Confederate Trans-Mississippi Department did not formally surrender until June 2, 1865—two months after the fall of Richmond. During that whole time, except for a few isolated areas, Texas was not occupied by Union troops and the whole area was in a sort of limbo, still officially in rebellion but without a clear course and without a national leadership. The officially took possession of Texas on June 5, but did not have soldiers to establish a formal presence. General Granger arrived with troops at Galveston on June 17, and two days later issued a series of administrative notices formally notifying all of Texas that the state was now under formal military occupation, who the key officers and departments were, and so on. The third of these notices was General Order No. 3, that formally announced emancipation under the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. These notices were published in papers around the state, first in Galveston and then elsewhere as the news was carried inland by telegraph and railroad."

"June 5, 1865. Federal forces formally took possession of Texas. Captain Benjamin F. Sands, commanding the division of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron stationed off Galveston, boarded a small Union steamer, USS Cornubia, and entered Galveston harbor, followed by another gunboat, USS Preston. Sands disembarked with a handful of other officers, but took no armed escort, and was met on the wharf by a Confederate officer. The officer escorted the Union men a few blocks to City Hall, where both Sands and the mayor of Galveston addressed a crowd that had gathered there. Both men made assurances of their goodwill and urged the population to go about their business peaceably. Sands told the crowd that he carried a sidearm that day not out of any fear for his own safety but as a sign of respect for the mayor and local officials. Then, along with the mayor, Sands continued on to the old U.S. Customs House, where he "hoisted our flag, which now, at last, was flying over every foot of our territory, this being the closing act of the great rebellion.""

"The stars at night are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas. The prairie sky is wide and high, deep in the heart of Texas. The sage in bloom is like perfume, deep in the heart of Texas. Reminds me of, the one I love, deep in the heart of Texas. The coyotes wail, along the trail, deep in the heart of Texas.The rabbits rush, around the brush, deep in the heart of Texas. The cowboys cry, Ki-yip-pee-yi!, deep in the heart of Texas. The doggies bawl, and bawl and bawl, deep in the heart of Texas!"

"This deadly, frigid, multibillion-dollar chaos in energy-rich Texas was not the result of a polar vortex but a small-minded vortex of right-wing political hokum that puts the interests of a few corporate profiteers over the well-being of the people... Responding to withering public criticism of the state's chaotic and disastrous response to a killer winter storm, Abbott fumed, "What happened this week to our fellow Texans is absolutely unacceptable."... Abbott pointed his outrage at ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the agency charged with maintaining a reliable flow of electricity to Texas homes, schools, businesses, etc. But... ERCOT merely administers policies set by the Public Utility Commission, and that corporate-cozy body has failed for years to mandate that the state's privatized, for-profit electric utilities weatherize their power generators to prevent freeze-ups. And who appointed the three members of that commission? Why, Greg, it was you! In fact, the chairwoman and one of the two other members of PUC are former top staffers of the governor."

"The word Texas is from a native word—or, a Caddo word—meaning "friendly". So, that means early Texas settlers were like, "Oh! "Friendly". That's a great one! I'm 'onna call this land Friendly. I like that word. Now, you gotta go! Git! It's my land now. Git! Git!"

"Texas will again lift its head and stand among the nations. it ought to do so, for no country upon the globe can compare with it in natural advantages."

"Texas has yet to learn submission to any oppression, come from what source it may."

"All new states are invested, more or less, by a class of noisy, second-rate men who are always in favor of rash and extreme measures, but Texas was absolutely overrun by such men."

"Texas is lost."

"One objection I have heard voiced to works of this kind—dealing with Texas—is the amount of gore spilled across the pages. It can not be otherwise. In order to write a realistic and true history of any part of the Southwest, one must narrate such things, even at the risk of monotony."

"If you haven't climbed up to Enchanted Rock, Drank a cold Shiner down in Luckenbach, Taken your baby to the River Walk, Then you ain't met My Texas yet."

"If you never caught a trout down in Port A, Heard the words to Corpus Christi Bay, Never seen fireworks on PK, Then you ain't met My Texas yet."

"Havent had a kolache when you go through West, Never heard of the Larry Jo Taylor fest, Think polished pop country crap sounds the best, Then you ain't met My Texas yet."

"You say you haven't hiked through Big Bend, Had your hair blown back by a Lubbock wind, Been somewhere where they call you "friend", Then you ain't met My Texas yet."

"Texas is about as far from a Green New Deal as you can possibly get, seeing as a Green New Deal is a plan to bring together the need to get off fossil fuels in the next decade to radically decarbonize our energy system,.. to marry that huge infrastructure investment in the next green economy with a plan to battle poverty, to create huge numbers of good, union, green jobs, to take care of people. It’s a plan to have universal public healthcare and child care and a jobs guarantee. So it’s all the things that are not happening in Texas, because there isn’t just this extreme weather, which many scientists believe is linked to our warming planet — you know, you can’t link one storm with climate change, but the patterns are very clear, and this should be a wake-up call — but Texas is also suffering a pandemic of poverty, of exclusion, of racial injustice... we’ve heard this messaging, I think, because of panic, frankly, because the Green New Deal is a plan that could solve so many of Texas’s problems and the problems across the country, and Republicans have absolutely nothing to offer except for more deregulation, more privatization, more austerity. And so they have been frantically seeking to deflect from the real causes of this crisis, which is an intersection of extreme weather, of the kind that we are seeing more of because of climate change, intersecting with a deregulated, fossil fuel-based energy system."

"One in four Texans lacks health insurance, the highest proportion in the nation."

"I can see that lone star from a thousand miles away calling me back home though I've ventured far astray. When I see that beacon shining for me all alone, it calls me back to Texas and to home."

"The pattern of abuses in Uvalde County is strikingly reminiscent of the Deep South of the early 1960s. The Civil Rights Commission's study documents that duly registered Chicano voters are not being placed on the voting lists; that election judges are selectively and deliberately invalidating ballots cast by minority voters; that election judges are refusing to aid minority voters who are illiterate in English; that the tax assessor-collector of Uvalde County, who is responsible for registering voters, refuses to name members of minority groups as deputy registrars; that the Uvalde County tax assessor repeatedly runs out of registration application cards when minority voter applicants ask for them; that the Uvalde County tax assessor-collector refuses to register voter applicants based on the technicality that the application was filed on a printed card bearing a previous year's date. Other abuses were uncovered by the study of the Civil Rights Commission in Uvalde County, and elsewhere in Texas: Widespread gerrymandering with the purpose of diluting minority voting strength; systematic drawing of at-large electoral districts with this same purpose and design; maintenance of polling places exclusively in areas inaccessible to minority voters; excessive firing fees to run for political office"

"In Texas, as many of you know, children were required to be educated in either the white or the colored school. Officials in Texas, and I have in mind Pecos County and Nueces County, which have large percentages of Mexican American people, could not decide whether Mexican Americans were white or colored, so we got no schools. In most other schools, as in Uvalde, we were in fact put into a third category of school, called the Mexican school."

"In order to prevail in Texas, we have to argue what is now known as the northern de jure segregation cases. We culled through the school board minutes going back to 1919. We traced the development of their school construction policies, their school assignment policies. We noticed that even toys were provided on the basis of race; twice the amount was spent for children in the Anglo schools as for children in the Mexican school, even though there were double the number of children in the Mexican schools as in the Anglo schools."