These Mississippi quotes will inspire you. Mississippi is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States, bordered to the north by Tennessee; to the east by Alabama; to the south by the Gulf of Mexico; to the southwest by Louisiana; and to the northwest by Arkansas.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging Mississippi quotes, Mississippi sayings, and Mississippi proverbs.
Famous Mississippi Quotes
- “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.” ~ William Faulkner
- “She was so Southern that she cried tears that came straight from the Mississippi, and she always smelled faintly of cottonwood and peaches.” ~ Sarah Addison Allen
- “Nothing could stop Mississippi.” ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
- “I went to college in Mississippi; I’m from Louisiana.” ~ Trishelle Cannatella
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“Everyone thinks because you’re from the south you know everyone down there, but it’s not like that; I never knew nothing about no Mississippi.” ~ Buddy Guy
- “Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico” ~ William Faulkner
- “Courage isn’t something you are born with. It comes to you with experience.” ~ Patricia Neal
- “The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.” ~ Bill Bryson
- “I see more genuine sociability between the races in Mississippi than I see in Michigan. No question.” ~ Jim Harrison
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“We’re first on executions. We’re 49th in funding public education. We’re in a race with Mississippi for the bottom, and we’re winning.” ~ Kinky Friedman
- “Mississippi is like my mother. I am allowed to complain about her all I want, but God help the person who raises an ill word about her around me, unless she is their mother too.” ~ Kathryn Stockett
- “That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records. You can hear it all the way through.” ~ Muddy Waters
- “Finally, the ecological health of the Mississippi River and its economic importance to the many people that make their living or seek their recreation is based on a healthy river system.” ~ Ron Kind
- “My parents were working in a hospital in Memphis. But I didn’t live there for any length of time that I remember. The first thing I remember is the town in Mississippi that I live in now, Charleston.” ~ Morgan Freeman
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“Only remember west of the Mississippi it’s a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “I was always singing the way I felt, and maybe I didn’t exactly know it, but I just didn’t like the way things were down there-in Mississippi.” ~ Muddy Waters
- “The gifts of God should be enjoyed by all citizens in Mississippi.” ~ Medgar Evers
- “Several other aerospace and defense firms have announced plans to build facilities in north Mississippi in recent weeks. They join an impressive group of high-tech companies already doing business in our region.” ~ Roger Wicker
- “A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi… has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It’s not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.” ~ Thurgood Marshall
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“The folks in Mississippi are saying, ‘Thank God for Texas.'” ~ Kinky Friedman
- “I rode on a float in one of the parades in Mississippi. It’s an experience.” ~ Elliott Smith
- “If you talk to the Whites in Mississippi they will tell you, ‘You can go to any school you want to; we don’t see race.’ Biggest lie ever told.” ~ Bennie Thompson
- “The Klan had used fear, intimidation and murder to brutally oppress over African-Americans who sought justice and equality and it sought to respond to the young workers of the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the same way.” ~ Charles Rangel
- “As founder and co-chair of the upper Mississippi River Congressional task force, I have long sought to preserve the river’s health and historical multiple uses, including as a natural waterway and a home to wildlife, for the benefit of future generations of Americans.” ~ Ron Kind
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“I’m from the Mississippi delta originally.” ~ Little Milton
- “Had it not been for James Meredith, who was willing to risk his life, the University of Mississippi would still be all white.” ~ Constance Baker Motley
- “Freedom Summer, the massive voter education project in Mississippi, was 1964. I graduated from high school in 1965. So becoming active was almost a rite of passage.” ~ Danny Glover
- “The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi.” ~ Beth Henley
- “Vicksburg lies on top of a bluff on the east side of a large tongue of land jutting out into the Mississippi.” ~ Knute Nelson
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“Im concerned about the cost, just like everybody else. Theres no question that we have an obligation to help the people of Louisiana and Mississippi to rebuild.” ~ Saxby Chambliss
- “I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way. Go back? What I want to go back for?” ~ Muddy Waters
- “I can’t speak for the Kathryn Stockett, but I would guess that she feels proud of the progress the South has made because, growing up, she experienced a very different Mississippi than the one that exists today.” ~ Viola Davis
- “Mississippi gets more than their fair share back in federal money, but who the hell wants to live in Mississippi?” ~ Charles Rangel
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“Elvis was the only man from Northeast Mississippi who could shake his hips and still be loved by rednecks, cops, and hippies.” ~ Jimmy Buffett
- “Hollywood is run by people who sit up in their executive office, who are not connected to Mississippi, Alabama, Chicago, South Carolina. They know nothing about that, they don’t go to church, and they make their decisions about what they think is right.” ~ Steve Harvey
- “Forty percent of the United States drains into the Mississippi. It’s agriculture. It’s golf courses. It’s domestic runoff from our lawns and roads. Ultimately, where does it go? Downstream into the gulf.” ~ Sylvia Earle
- “It was very clear to me in 1965, in Mississippi, that, as a lawyer, I could get people into schools, desegregate the schools, but if they were kicked off the plantations – and if they didn’t have food, didn’t have jobs, didn’t have health care, didn’t have the means to exercise those civil rights, we were not going to have success.” ~ Marian Wright Edelman
- “I have been in the witness protection program for the last three weeks. I campaigned for Ralph Nader. I’m now living as a woman in Mississippi.” ~ Phil Donahue
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“I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays.” ~ Beth Henley
- “Simultaneously with the establishment of the Constitution, Virginia ceded to the United States her domain, which then extended to the Mississippi, and was even claimed to extend to the Pacific Ocean.” ~ William H. Seward
- “One day I know the struggle will change. There’s got to be a change not only for Mississippi, not only for the people in the United States but people all over the world.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “The distance between taking social action and having the knowledge is as wide as the mouth of the Mississippi.” ~ Mort Sahl
- “Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.” ~ Oprah Winfrey
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“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” ~ Mark Twain
- “The Missouri is, perhaps, different in appearance and character from all other rivers in the world; there is a terror in its manner which is sensibly felt, the moment we enter its muddy waters from the Mississippi.” ~ George Catlin
- “The attorney general would call at 5 o’clock in the evening and say: ‘Tomorrow morning we are going to try to integrate the University of Mississippi. Get us a memo on what we’re likely to do, and what we can do if the governor sends the National Guard there.'” ~ Harold H. Greene
- “I didn’t come east of the Mississippi for the first time in my life until I was 26 years of age, but I knew. I read magazines, I listened to radio, I watched television. I knew there was something out there, and I wanted a part of it.” ~ Sam Donaldson
- “I’ve just come back from Mississippi and over there when you talk about the West Bank they think you mean Arkansas.” ~ Pat Buchanan
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“They would come down in Mississippi, they hired me as a talent scout. And I would go all over Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and find out different artists for them.” ~ Ike Turner
- “Mississippi Mermaid was a very special experience because we only had the dialogues for the scenes we were shooting the night before.” ~ Catherine Deneuve
- “The case of the Seminoles constitutes at present the only exception to the successful efforts of the Government to remove the Indians to the homes assigned them west of the Mississippi.” ~ Martin Van Buren
- “Of course, that was my idol, Son House. I think he did a lot for the Mississippi slide down there.” ~ Muddy Waters
- “This United States Government should go down to Mississippi and protect my people. That is what should happen.” ~ Paul Robeson
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“In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington. It was the first time I felt like a human being.” ~ Paul Robeson
- “Most of the locks and dams on the upper Mississippi River system are over 60 years old and many are in serious need of repair and rehabilitation.” ~ Ron Kind
- “It affords me sincere pleasure to be able to apprise you of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi.” ~ Martin Van Buren
- “Georgia Tech beat us and Mississippi Southern tied us last year, and Texas beat us after we had the game won. We only played about five games the way we were capable of playing and lost one of those.” ~ Bear Bryant
- “History – a vast Mississippi of falsehoods” ~ Matthew Arnold
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“I grew up in Mississippi being told it was a great place, but not feeling that. When I finally began reading seriously, literature showed me something about where I was from which was worthwhile.” ~ Richard Ford
- “I loved Mississippi and do to this day. The rainbows that stretch from horizon to horizon after a summer rain are the most spectacular I have ever seen.” ~ Charley Pride
- “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day, even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into a oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by content of their character. I have a dream today!” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“When you’re from Weir, Mississippi, almost everywhere you go looks like the big city.” ~ Roy Oswalt
- “These people in Mississippi State, they are not “down”; all they need is a chance. And I am determined to give my part not for what the Movement can do for me, but what I can do for the Movement to bring about a change in the State of Mississippi.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “In the state of Mississippi, Many Years Ago, a boy of 14 years got a taste of Southern law.” ~ Phil Ochs
- “And the fact that Emmett Till, a young black man, could be found floating down the river in Mississippi, as, indeed, many had been done over the years, this set in concrete the determination of people to move forward.” ~ Fred Shuttlesworth
