States Of The United States

"'The people of the South', says a contemporary, 'are not fighting for slavery but for independence'. Let us look into this matter. It is an easy task, we think, to show up this new-fangled heresy, a heresy calculated to do us no good, for it cannot deceive foreign statesmen nor peoples, nor mislead any one here nor in Yankeeland... Our doctrine is this. WE ARE FIGHTING FOR INDEPENDENCE THAT OUR GREAT AND NECESSARY DOMESTIC INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY SHALL BE PRESERVED, and for the preservation of other institutions of which slavery is the groundwork."

"Virginians typically treated their slaves harshly."

"Better, far better! Endure all the horrors of civil war than to see the dusky sons of Ham leading the fair daughters of the South to the altar."

"Our story actually begins at Jamestown, as almost all Virginia stories do... yes, even the story of Hampden-Sydney's College Presbyterian Church."

"The Jamestown settlers never ever pretended to have come to the New World on a noble quest for religious freedom. Instead, they represented a daring economic endeavor which was sponsored by a group of venture capitalists who were collectively known as The Virginia Company. Many of these forefathers of the fabled "First Families of Virginia" were, in fact, escaping Old World arrest warrants, debt collectors, paternity suits, military obligations, home duties, and the like. No, for the Jamestown pioneers- as well as for most of those who soon followed them to other nearby Tidewater villages and plantations- the purity and the practice of their Christian faith were secondary matters... although the Jamestown colony did have an Anglican priest among its settlers, and very shortly he began celebrating the Eucharist for these men. There were Calvinist Puritans in this group, but they just quietly tolerated this religious exercise without protest, while not completely embracing its theology."

"However, even if these earliest Virginians had been seeking the free and unfettered practice of their particular type of Christianity, there would be no true "religious freedom" anywhere in Virginia for nearly two more centuries... and therefore surviving with one's personal faith intact would become the defining struggle for most of the Presbyterians who immigrated to this same colony during the 17th and 18th centuries."

"Officially all of the early white Virginia settlers [and any of their black slaves and their native neighbors (e.g., Pocahontas) who were subsequently evangelized into Christianity] were supposed to be, or assumed to be, members of the Anglican Church. While those who openly declared themselves to be otherwise were not specifically labeled as "outlaws", their rather prejudicial classification as "dissenters" meant that those daring-to-be-different Christians were living on the teeter-totter edge of colonial legality, Crown loyalty, and civil propriety."

"When a civil war began in the 1640s between the King's forces and the Parliamentary forces, many English religious dissenters joined the anti-royalists. At this time, Virginia's royal governor, William Berkeley, reacted by arbitrarily condemning all Virginia dissenters as similar being seditious anti-royalists; some Tidewater dissenters were banished from Virginia at this time, while others simply moved farther up the James River to areas (in present-day Hanover County) north and west of its fall-line. Some of these "uprooted and transplanted" Piedmont dissenters became the ancestors of the Presbyterian congregation that would later be formed at Hampden-Sydney, Virginia."

"The Virginia town of Charlottesville is a good place to remember. I was born there on March 13, 1887, and lived there until 1909 when I left for a new home, the Marine Corps. Forty years later I returned, then moved to Florida, my current home. Charlottesville is still a good place to remember. To me Charlottesville will always be a little town sitting quiet in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the home of some 8,000 people, dirt streets lighted by gas lamps, a yellow glow that on a winter evening peeped comfortably through the drawn drapery of the red-brick houses on East High Street- my route when I was hurrying to explain to my parents why I was late for supper."

"In those years we lived rather close to the Civil War, an atmosphere that molded our likes and dislikes almost into one. We were so soundly Democratic that our parents always pointed out Charlottesville's only Republican to any visitor. The first time politics meant anything to me was during Grover Cleveland's second campaign. My mother took me to the balcony of Monticello Hotel to watch a torchlight political parade which to me meant my father handsomely dressed in a gray alpaca coat, a gray beaver hat and a rooster on his shoulder. Such state occasions rarely occurred. Most of the time we entertained ourselves. In spring, when Virginia smells sweeter than any place I have since visited in the world, we went blackberrying to bring back loaded pails which Henrietta, my mother's cook of long years, baked into fragrant and delicious pies. Summers we swam in the Rivanna River, a muddy little stream about two miles from town; sometimes we fished it from an old flat-bottomed boat and occasionally pulled out a perch or catfish. When the leaves turned brown we took schoolbags and hiked to the nearby Ragged Mountains to garner bushels of chestnuts and later to cook them over red coals and enjoy their odor as much as their meat. After Christmas the little ponds sometimes froze over, which meant digging out skates from the hall closet and trying our luck on ice never more than an inch and a half thick- and many were the duckings we took."

"This being only thirty years after the Civil War, Charlottesville abounded in military experiences. From as long as I can remember Grandfather Carson told me stories about his campaigns. He was a very impressive man and I listened carefully to his tales. He was also very devout. A Baptist deacon, he said prayers before breakfast; if you missed these, you missed breakfast. He held few men in awe, but those few he treated mighty respectfully- he always prayed to "the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.""

"A well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power."

"Sic semper tyrannis"

"Today, I offer the Commonwealth's sincere apology for Virginia's participation in eugenics. We must remember the Commonwealth's past mistakes in order to prevent them from recurring."

"There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy. We have consistently denied the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race. There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause."

"As Maine goes, so goes the nation."

"I looked along the San Juan Islands and the coast of California, but I couldn't find the palette of green, granite, and dark blue that you can only find in Maine."

"My grandfather once told her if you couldn't read with cold feet, there wouldn't be a literate soul in the state of Maine."

"The Southwest was spectacular, but I have no interest in moving there. North Carolina is beautiful in spring and fall. But I can say I didn't find anyplace I'd rather live than Maine."

"When people asked me in a RV park, "What do you do?" I just said, "I'm a retired state employee from Maine.""

"If Maine’s ruling [in Bickford v. Bradeen] stands, it sets a precedent that any judge, armed with a “cult expert,” can forbid a parent from raising a child in their faith. It is a dangerous conflation of secular prejudice with judicial authority."

"I felt like I'd been misplaced in the cosmos and I belonged in Maine."

"I will not listen to childcare lectures from a man who put his daughter in a box and shipped her to Maine."

"You can't get there from here."

"Trump's statements disparaging immigrants who have come to this country legally are particularly unhelpful. Maine has benefited from people from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and, increasingly, Africa — including our friends from Somalia."

"There was a young lady from Gloucester Who complained that her parents both bossed her, So she ran off to Maine. Did her parents complain? Not at all — they were glad to have lost her."

"They were walking along a roadway of great slabs of stone set down one after another, the beginning and end of which they could take in at a glance, a road rising from and heading toward nowhere now. "You can't get there from here," William said, using a Down East accent. "Anymore." Maine, they thought of Maine, then. Evidently this truncated road could still carry them as far away and as long ago as that."

"To the memory of Dr. Olfert Dapper, who saw a wild unicorn in the Maine woods in 1673, and for Robert Nathan, who has seen one or two in Los Angeles."

"There’s high awareness of the ballot measure. People understand Amendment 4 is on the ballot. But they don’t necessarily connect that there’s a six-week abortion ban."

"Internet memes sometimes refer to Florida as "the America of America," but to a Brit like me, it's more like the Australia of America: The wildlife is trying to kill you, the weather is trying to kill you, and the people retain a pioneer spirit, even when their roughest expedition is to the 18th hole. Florida’s place in the national mythology is as America’s pulsing id, a vision of life without the necessary restriction of shame. Chroniclers talk about its seasonless strangeness; the public meltdowns of its oddest residents; how retired CIA operatives, Mafia informants, and Jair Bolsonaro can be reborn there."

"Pensacola, I'm a rep it to death, 'cause I'm a Florida boy. Nothing more, nothing less. You disrespect or test what I say, it's body to the head, 'til shit go my way!"

"The three States of Georgia, Florida and South Carolina, comprising the military department of the south, having deliberately declared themselves no longer under the protection of the United States of America, and having taken up arms against the said United States, it becomes a military necessity to declare them under martial law. This was accordingly done on the 25th day of April, 1862. Slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible; the persons in these three States — Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina— heretofore held as slaves, are therefore declared forever free."

"I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste."

"Significantly, Floridians could not vote for Republican Abraham Lincoln, who was not on the ballot in any of the Deep South slave states. The hated 'Black Republican' Party was believed by most southerners to advocate abolition and black equality, although Lincoln and his party were primarily interested in restricting the expansion of slavery in the territories."

"When I was twelve, I helped my Daddy build a bomb shelter in our basement, because some damn fool parked a dozen warheads ninety miles off the coast of Florida. This thing could park a coupla' hundred warheads off Washington or New York and no-one would know anything about it until it was all over."

"Being a child in Florida when my parents moved there in 1948 and witnessing the changes in the coastline, the marshes that I first discovered - finding horseshoe crab eggs, these tiny little creatures prospering in really clear water and going out on a dock at night and seeing these bioluminescent creatures just flashing and glowing - and witnessing the change, that the waters became not beautiful, clear and blue but muddy - that was powerful incentive to say, why are we doing this?"

"The most exciting and by far the most important part of our Florida Project — in fact, the heart of everything we'll be doing in Disney World — will be our Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow! We call it EPCOT. … EPCOT will be an experimental prototype community of tomorrow that will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise."

"Here in Florida … we have something special we never enjoyed at Disneyland — the blessing of size. There's enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we can possibly imagine."

"From the earliest arrival of Europeans on America’s shores, religion has often been a cudgel, used to discriminate, suppress and even kill the foreign, the “heretic” and the “unbeliever”—including the “heathen” natives already here. Moreover, while it is true that the vast majority of early-generation Americans were Christian, the pitched battles between various Protestant sects and, more explosively, between Protestants and Catholics, present an unavoidable contradiction to the widely held notion that America is a “Christian nation.”. First, a little overlooked history: the initial encounter between Europeans in the future United States came with the establishment of a Huguenot (French Protestant) colony in 1564 at Fort Caroline (near modern Jacksonville, Florida). More than half a century before the Mayflower set sail, French pilgrims had come to America in search of religious freedom. The Spanish had other ideas. In 1565, they established a forward operating base at St. Augustine and proceeded to wipe out the Fort Caroline colony. The Spanish commander, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, wrote to the Spanish King Philip II that he had “hanged all those we had found in [Fort Caroline] because...they were scattering the odious Lutheran doctrine in these Provinces.” When hundreds of survivors of a shipwrecked French fleet washed up on the beaches of Florida, they were put to the sword, beside a river the Spanish called Matanzas (“slaughters”). In other words, the first encounter between European Christians in America ended in a blood bath."

"Florida’s a great place for folks in their old age…an’ it helps them get there faster, too. You go down for a change and a rest; the bellboy gets the change, an' the hotel gets the rest. The day I checked out they gave me a bill which looked like the distance to the farthest star computed in inches, an’ if I hadn't been able to leave behind me a suitcase containin’ ten thousand shares in a copper mine which may be discovered in Colorado some day, I would o’ felt mighty guilty slidin’ down that rainspout."

"Key West, the end of the road, the most flamboyant, decadent, debauched and pungent place in the Florida. Key West is Florida’s Florida—the place way down at the bottom where the weirdest of the weird end up; the place where the abnormal is normal."

"• Under Florida’s “stand your ground” law, it is legal to shoot anybody for any reason as long as you are standing on the ground."

"• Florida’s government is divided into three branches: the executive, the judicial and the criminal."

"Southern states in general have seen more rapid growth in recent decades as people, especially retirees, have migrated to warm-weather states. Florida, which has a minimum wage that is 70 cents higher than the national minimum, has seen job growth of 110 percent since 1981."

"It is my hope that we're moving beyond racial appeals here in Florida and in the rest of the South as well. I say it's time we told the rest of the nation that we aren't caught up in the mania to stop busing at any cost, that we're trying to mature politically down here, that we know know the real issues when we see them and that we no longer will be fooled, frightened and divided against ourselves. That is how the South can lead other regions to a better understanding of what this country's all about."

"I found that I simply couldn't take fantasy seriously, so it became humourous, and continued from there. I turned my home state of Florida into the Land of Xanth."

"In God We Trust."

"There was a guy down in Florida who said that, at the age of 53 years old, he was in good enough physical condition to withstand the wind, rain and hail of a force-3 hurricane. Now, let me explain somethin' to ya: it isn't that the wind is blowin', it's what the wind is blowin'. If you get hit by a Volvo, it doesn't matter how many sit-ups you did that morning."

"Just not being senile is considered great down here."

"One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look unspoiled."