Progress never defines its ultimate objective but thrusts its victims at once into an infinite series,’ Mr. [John Crowe] Ransom said’ ‘Industrialism,’ he declared, ‘is rightfully a menial, of almost miraculous cunning, but no intelligence;...

Today the South is faced with fresh assaults upon its regime and its order of values. All the while it has known that what grudging respect it has obtained from the North has come because...

The United States lost more men from battle wounds and disease in the Civil War than in any other war of its history, including the Second World War. The battle front stretched from Pennsylvania to...

People who give up their own land too readily need careful weighing, exactly as do those who are so with their convictions. Even Solomon said that the eyes of a fool are in the ends...

The Southerner tends to look upon nature as something which is given and something which is finally inscrutable. This is equivalent to saying that he looks upon it as the creation of a Creator.

Man is a mixture of good and evil, and he can never be perfected in this life. The notion of his natural goodness is a delusive theory which will blow up any social order that...

Equality is a disorganizing concept in so far as human relations mean order.

The assertion of purpose in a world we felt to be purposeless would be a form of sentimentality.

The saying of John Peale Bishop is worth recalling, that the South excelled in two things which the French deem essential to civilization: a code of manners and a native cuisine. Both are apt to...

All work is a bringing of the ideal from potentiality into actuality.

In the last analysis, provincialism is your belief in yourself, in your neighborhood, in your reality. It is patriotism without belligerence. Convincing cases have been made to show that all great art is provincial in...

Where simple massness exists, everyone is in everyone else’s way, and a certain perilious liberty has been traded for stultification.

Absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.

I’m an old person. I don’t want to make it sound bad. I think it’s something to be proud of.