Death and taxes and childbirth. There's never any convenient time for any of them.
I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.
The south produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors and lawyers and poets, but certainly no engineers and mechanics. Let Yankees adopt such low callings.
Southerners can never resist a losing cause.
There ain't nothing from the outside that can lick any of us.
What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one.