“My mother was widely loved, and rightly so – and widely regarded as too sweet for words. Well, she had them buffaloed. Any woman who could out-stubborn a dachshund deserved to be accorded the wary and respectful affection the dachshund gave her.” MothersDachshunds Author:Markham Shaw Pyle
“Public life in this country is too damn dominated by people who’d read more if only their lips didn’t get so tired.” American Politics Author:Markham Shaw Pyle
“Over the course of human history, many items have briefly flourished as means of exchange, only to be demonetarized. Now, we have demonetarized money.” MoneyCurrencyExchangeBarter Author:Markham Shaw Pyle
“... in 1912, although he, more even than other members of the Senate and the House, thought himself presidential timber (a delusion from which vanishingly few senators and representatives are wholly free when they gaze enraptured into their mirrors of a morning), Senator [William Alden] Smith wasn’t noted for much of anything.” Congress Author:Markham Shaw Pyle
“If the power to tax is the power to destroy, the power to regulate is no less so.” RegulationRegulatory CaptureRms Titanic Author:Markham Shaw Pyle
“Regarding 'Jabez's Prayer', I will say at once that I am a very poor Christian, and indeed a bad man. My besetting sins are many, and the least of them are the fleshlier ones: the really deadly ones are pride and intellectual arrogance. But I can honestly say I have never sunk to confusing prayer: the soul's colloquy with the Creator, mortal man's dialogue with the Deity: with magical incantation and the ritual of the 'spell.” ReligionPrayerIncantationsJabez Author:Markham Shaw Pyle
“Justice can readily do her job blindfolded; she cannot function gagged and deafened, least of all when the means of gagging and deafening her are not remarked.” JusticeLawmaking Author:Markham Shaw Pyle
“But that’s the thing about East Texas. Red dirt never quite washes out, and pine pollen is tenacious as original sin. You can leave East Texas, for Houston, for the Metroplex, for the Commonwealth, for New York, or Bonn or Tokyo or Kowloon; but you can never quite leave it behind.” TexasDeep SouthEast TexasPiney Woods Author:Markham Shaw Pyle
“No matter where you go in East Texas, ‘Deep’ East Texas is always about twenty miles further in than wherever you are.” TexasDeep SouthEast TexasPiney Woods Author:Markham Shaw Pyle
“In keeping with the Laws of the Prophet Bubba and the Code of the UIL, as set forth in the Book of First Downs, as the sun sets on Friday nights the rites of the Texas state religion are celebrated: high school, smash-mouth football. ‘And lo, the children of Jim Bob do take to the roads in caravans and they do go up unto the stadium by tribes, the Indians of Groveton, the Panthers of Lufkin, the Mustangs of Overton, and the very Wildcats of Palestine, and who shall withstand the traffic jams thereof?’ Thus is it written, and so it is and shall be.” FootballTexasDeep SouthEast TexasPiney Woods Author:Markham Shaw Pyle
“East Texas is red dirt – not red, in sober truth, but the orange of rust, which it basically is, ferrous oxide – and magnolias and azaleas and dogwoods, old fields long since cottoned-out, far from the Mississippi River bottomlands that were ‘rich as six feet up a bull’s ass’: a land of hogs and hominy, and a tangled, grim past of slavery and segregation. It could as easily be the country as far eastwards of the Mississippi as it is west: it would fit all too readily into the area between Brandon and Meridian, Mississippi, hard by the Bienville National Forest.” TexasDeep SouthEast TexasPiney Woods Author:Markham Shaw Pyle