Yankee Quotes

“I've barely said five words to you. What indication could you possibly have that I am a Yankee?"

"Well, we could start with the words 'what indication.' Someone from south of the Mason-Dixon would have said, 'Who the hell are you calling a Yankee?' Then we would have fought.”
― Jana Deleon

“It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.”
― Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline

“She had seen Southern men, soft voiced and dangerous in the days before the war, reckless and hard in the last despairing days of the fighting. But in the faces of the two men who stared at each other across the candle flame so short a while ago there had been something that was different, something that heartened her but frightened her — fury which could find no words, determination which would stop at nothing.
For the first time, she felt a kinship with the people about her, felt one with them in their fears, their bitterness, their determination. No, it wasn’t to be borne! The South was too beautiful a place to be let go without a struggle, too loved to be trampled by Yankees who hated Southerners enough to enjoy grinding them into the dirt, too dear a homeland to be turned over to ignorant people drunk with whisky and freedom.
As she thought of Tony’s sudden entrance and swift exit, she felt herself akin to him, for she remembered the old story how her father had left Ireland, left hastily and by night, after a murder which was no murder to him or to his family. Gerald’s blood was in her, violent blood. She remembered her hot joy in shooting the marauding Yankee. Violent blood was in them all, perilously close to the surface, lurking just beneath the kindly courteous exteriors. All of them, all the men she knew, even the drowsy-eyed Ashley and fidgety old Frank, were like that underneath — murderous, violent if the need arose. Even Rhett, conscienceless scamp that he was, had killed a man for being “uppity to a lady.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the word "impossible" is not a French one. People have evidently been deceived by the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise. Between Barbicane's proposition and its realization no true Yankee would have allowed even the semblance of a difficulty to be possible. A thing with them is no sooner said than done.”
― Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon

“Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the word "impossible" in not a French one. People have evidently been deceived by the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise. Between Barbicane's proposition and its realization no true Yankee would have allowed even the semblance of a difficulty to be possible. A thing with them is no sooner said than done.”
― Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon

“Ours is not just the United States of America, ours is the United States of Assimilation.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Shape of A Human: Our America Their America

“What America explores today, the world explores a decade later.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Shape of A Human: Our America Their America

“America is impossibility made possible.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Shape of A Human: Our America Their America

“Who are we? We are the lovers of this land. Who are we? We are the children of this land. Who are we? We are the soldiers of this land.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Shape of A Human: Our America Their America

“If you were from a state that didn’t fight for the Confederacy, you were a Yankee.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“Are ya havin' a Heart Attack, a Stroke - Do Ya Smell Toast”
― Kris Courtney, Florida Retirement Is Murder