Top 1200 Southern Gentleman Quotes & Sayings

Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.

When you say, 'Southern,' or you speak about a southern accent, there's always that drawl, and usually from white people. That's what people associate with the South. But we're all different. The black southern accent is different.

No young lady can be justified in falling in love before the gentleman's love is declared, it must be very improper that a young lady should dream of a gentleman before the gentleman is first known to have dreamt of her.

A Christian is God Almighty's gentleman: a gentleman, in the vulgar superficial way of understanding the word, is the Devil's Christian.

A gentleman considers justice to be essential in everything. He practices it according to the principles of propriety. He brings it forth in modesty and faithfully completes it. This is indeed a gentleman.

I formally proposed. I'm a good Southern gentleman.

I'm glad I'm Southern. I'm the Southerner who's very Southern in that she left to move to New York.

Southern food that appears in contemporary popular culture is so exaggerated that it's hardly recognizable to most Southerners. This enriching of Southern food - fatter, richer, more over the top - is what we typically see on TV, in Hollywood films, and in Southern-style or country-themed chains like Cracker Barrel. Southern food becomes a caricature, like characters and props in a reality TV show.

More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men.

If Wellington epitomizes the English gentleman, Eisenhower epitomizes the natural American gentleman.

I was always a friend of southern rights, but an enemy of southern wrongs.

If there are greater activities in Vesuvius or Pelee, then the southern coast of California and the areas between Salt Lake and the southern portions of Nevada, we may expect, within the three months following same, inundation by the earthquakes. But these are to be more in the Southern than the Northern Hemisphere.

He screamed. Mmm?' inquired the gentleman. I...I would never presume to interrupt you, sir. But the ground appears to be swallowing me up.' It is a bog,' said the gentleman, helpfully. It is certainly a most terrifying substance.

In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is 'noble,' that ought to count as presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.

I remember my father had a sermon he used to preach when we were in Florida, in which he gave a reference to the Southern Cross-about the stars, the colors, in the Southern Cross, which thrilled me very much. I must have been around 5 years old. ... Now, it turns out that the Southern Cross itself does have one red star, together with three blue ones.

The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman.

A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.

A true gentleman doesn’t prefer blondes. A true gentleman doesn’t have any preferences whatsoever.

Memories of my Southern upbringing in Richmond, Virginia, always include the smell of good southern food: fried chicken, cheese grits, Smithfield ham, and buttermilk biscuits.

The idea that no gentleman ever swears is all wrong. He can swear and still be a gentleman if he does it in a nice and benevolent and affectionate way.

I named my album Year of the Gentleman. Just looking at how the essence of what it is to be a gentleman is very much lacking nowadays. Someone said to me that chivalry is dead, and I hated to have to agree, but it's true.

I think a gentleman is someone who holds the comfort of other people above their own. The instinct to do that is inside every good man, I believe. The rules about opening doors and buying dinner and all of that other 'gentleman' stuff is a chess game, especially these days.

My Grandmother would say, 'Make sure you look good. Make sure you speak well. Make sure you remain that Southern gentleman that I've taught you to be.'

If you go to Paris, try to speak French. If you go to the South, try to speak Southern. Southern isn't stupid. Southern is narrative; Southern is family.

One of the most singular facts about the unwritten history of this country is the consummate ability with which Southern influence, Southern ideas and Southern ideals, have from the very beginning even up to the present day, dictated to and domineered over the brain and sinew of this nation.

I was always the Southern gentleman.

Once a gentleman, and always a gentleman.

There's something about Southern women that is so unique yet so universal. Strong southern women are allowed to be soft and feminine and have a sense of humor. But what I love about Southern women in particular is their universality.

He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal.

I'm ready to do some classics. Maybe I wasn't in the beginning. I weighed 179 pounds when I got to New York, and I had that thick Southern accent. I still talk Southern, but I can do without it.

Slavery destroys, or vitiates, or pollutes, whatever it touches. No interest of society escapes the influence of its clinging curse. It makes Southern religion a stench in the nostrils of Christendom; it makes Southern politics a libel upon all the principles of republicanism; it makes Southern literature a travesty upon the honorable profession of letters.

About this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman's education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.

We were bunched up with Southern bands, and there's nothing wrong with that at all. We just wanted to make it clear we weren't a Southern band.

JACK Your duty as a gentleman calls you back. ALGERNON My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree.

Irony is to the high-bred what billingsgate is to the vulgar; and when one gentleman thinks another gentleman an ass, he does not say it point-blank, he implies it in the politest terms he can invent.

People come to Nashville where I live and they say, 'What's a great Southern restaurant?' Well, you got to know the right grandmother, because there's a lot of magic to good Southern cooking.

I grew up with fantastic Southern food. In Southern California.

The honor of a gentleman demands the inviolability of his word, and the incorruptibility of his principles. He is the descendent of the knight, the crusader; he is the defender of the defenseless and the champion of justice--or he is not a gentleman.

I tend to play every color in the Southern rainbow, and the challenge is to make each character different so I'm not doing any generic 'Southern acting.'

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

They treat me like a fox, a cunning fellow (Schlaukopf) of the first rank. But the truth is that with a gentleman I am always a gentleman and a half, and when I have to do with a pirate, I try to be a pirate and a half.

I've had battles with writers who live in L.A. and were writing southern characters, because they felt like if they wrote 'Sugar' and 'Honey' at the end of every sentence, that would make it southern.

Jimmy Carter, of course, was beloved. Peanut farmer. Came out of nowhere, governor of Georgia. Normally Democrats hate Southern accents, 'cause Southern accents equals Deliverance, equals hayseed, equals idiot. But if it's one of them... But you had to look the other way with Jimmy Carter and then here came Bill Clinton later. So depending on where the Southern accent's from, they'll make an exception and not be prejudicial about it. But for the most part, a Southern accent may as well be a slave owner as far as Democrats are concerned; they want no part of it.

I like health-conscious cooking, but growing up in the South, I do love southern cooking; southern France, southern Italy, southern Spain. I love southern cooking.

As a matter of fact [my mother] is very happily married. To a very nice southern gentleman named Roanoke - her first non-Jewish husband, as she likes to say.

The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.

But let's speak of art for a moment. Yes, art. I know a gentleman who makes excellent portraits. This gentleman is a camera.

It's hard to describe one's own alchemy that makes one into a writer, but I definitely think American language is so interesting, and specifically Southern language and black Southern language; it's hard to separate Southern language from black language.

I also grew up on a farm in east Tennessee, so my roots are just naturally super southern, so I've always had that southern country lifestyle.

The gentleman will sit! The gentleman is correct in sitting!

William Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have made him both legendary and necessary. His book, The Storied South , is a love song to the South Bill helped illuminate. It's a crowning achievement of his own storied career.

Southern change gonna come at last! Now your crosses are burning fast, Southern Man.

The truth is this: I am a Southern Baptist, and the great majority of Southern Baptists are lost.

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.

To a gentleman, a gentleman-someone who dies without ever pronouncing the word-is a man who climbs Everest, never mentions it to a soul, and listens politely to Pochet's account of how in 1937 in spite of his sciatica, he conquered the Puy de Dome.

I'm a southern gentleman.

You’re a gentleman,” they used to say to him. “You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman.

This story is based on a gentleman who indeed did... used to come to my parents' house in 1971 from Bangladesh. He was at the University of Rhode Island. And I was four, four years old, at the time, and so I actually don't have any memories of this gentleman.

Perhaps propriety is as near a word as any to denote the manners of the gentleman; elegance is necessary to the fine gentleman; dignity is proper to noblemen; and majesty to kings.

If the aristocrat is only valid in fashionable circles, and not with truckmen, he will never be a leader in fashion; and if the man of the people cannot speak on equal terms with the gentleman, so that the gentleman shall perceive that he is already really of his own order, he is not to be feared.