May 27, 2024, 7:45 p.m.
From its vast landscapes and rich history to its spirited people and unique culture, Texas is a place of immense pride for its residents. This pride manifests itself through countless expressions, capturing the essence of what it means to be a Texan. Whether you're a native or someone who simply admires the Lone Star State, these Texas pride quotes will resonate with you. In this post, we've curated a collection of the top 35 Texas pride quotes that encapsulate the unwavering spirit and distinct charm of Texas. Get ready to feel the Lone Star State pride as you read through these words of wisdom and inspiration.
1. “After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.” - Ann Richards
2. “If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell” - General Philip Henry Sheridan
3. “I like Texas and Texans. In Texas, everything is bigger. When Texans win, they win big. And when they lose, it's spectacular.If you really want to learn the attitude of how to handle risk, losing and failure, go to San Antonio and visit the Alamo. The Alamo is a great story of brave people who chose to fight, knowing there was no hope of success against overwhelming odds. They chose to die instead of surrendering. It's an inspiring story worthy of study; nonetheless, it's still a tragic military defeat. They got their butts kicked. A failure if you will. They lost. So how do Texans handle failure? They still shout, "Remember the Alamo!"That's why I like Texans so much. They took a great failure and turned it into a tourist destination that makes them millions.Texans don't bury their failures. They get inspired by them. They take their failures and turn them into rallying cries. Failure inspires Texans to become winners. But that formula is not just the formula for Texans. It is formula for all winners.” - Robert Kiyosaki
4. “I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery or paradox. But I think there will be little quarrel with my feeling that Texas is one thing. For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.” - John Steinbeck
5. “I felt a little guilty about jangling the poor bugger's brains with that evil fantasy. But what the hell? Anybody who wanders around the world saying, "Hell yes, I'm from Texas," deserves whatever happens to him.” - Hunter S. Thompson
6. “You can all go to hell; I will go to Texas” - David Crockett
7. “As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against 'em anyway, you don't belong in office.” - Molly Ivins
8. “As a Texan, I say ma'm and sir to my age contemporaries and open doors for anyone that I can. This goes for men, too, though it is appreciated when they beat me to it and disappointing when they don't.” - Tiffany Madison
9. “There’s a vastness here and I believe that the people who are born here breathe that vastness into their soul. They dream big dreams and think big thoughts, because there is nothing to hem them in.” - Conrad Hilton
10. “She'd grown up believing in hell in an abstract nightmare way; but west Texas had given her something more concrete upon which to dread the afterlife.” - Cherie Priest
11. “Special Agent Brad Wolgast hated Texas. He hated everything about it.[...] He hated the billboards and the freeways and the faceless subdivisions and the Texas flag, which flew over everything, always as big as a circus tent; he hated the giant pickup trucks everybody drove, no matter that gas was thirteen bucks a gallon and the world was slowly seaming itself to death like a package of peas in a microwave. He hated the boots and the belts and the way people talked, ya'll this and ya'll that, as if they spent the day ropin' and ridin', not cleaning teeth and selling insurance and doing the books, like people did everywhere.” - Justin Cronin
12. “These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas.Wait—Texas? Wasn't Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn't its governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that 'we have billions in surplus'? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years.And that reality has implications for the nation as a whole. For Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting—the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending—has been implemented most completely. If the theory can't make it there, it can't make it anywhere.” - Paul Krugman
13. “It is notorious that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation was kept from the people of Texas and not celebrated until 'Juneteenth'. There may be those in Texas now who believe they can insulate their state—a state that had its own courageous revolution—from the news of evolution and from the writing in 1786 of a Constitution that refuses to mention religion except when demarcating and limiting its role in the public square. But we promise them today that they will join their fore-runners in the flat-earth community, and in the mad clerical clique of those who believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Yes, they will be in schoolbooks—as a joke on the epic scale of William Jennings Bryan. We shall be fair, and take care to ensure that their tale is told.” - Christopher Hitchens
14. “Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan 'Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less'—with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be—locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore—was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, 'in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty'. By the time the infamous 'Drill Baby Drill' Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.” - Naomi Klein
15. “In the person of Quanah Parker, an extraordinary man in whom the blood of two strong peoples flowed, the Lone Star and the Comanche Moon at last found common ground.” - Thomas W. Knowles
16. “The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.” - Joseph Heller
17. “I like it here in Austin. Anybody got a room?” - Keith Richards
18. “Libraries offer, for free, the wisdom of the ages--and sages--and, simply put, there's something for everyone inside.” - Laura Bush
19. “Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention."[Shrub Flubs His Dub, The Nation, June 18, 2001]” - Molly Ivins
20. “This is America. We’re entitled to our opinions.”“Wrong. This is Texas. And my opinion is the only one that counts.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips
21. “You don't need meat at every meal," Riley offered, forking another bite of salad into his mouth and inwardly agreeing with Jack that it was certainly lacking something. Jack was quiet for all of ten seconds, and then he couldn't hold in his opinion one second more. "Are you really a Texan? I mean, really? Riley, if I have a headache, I'd put bacon around an aspirin before I take it.” - RJ Scott
22. “No wonder, he thought, that the panhandle people were a godly lot, for they lived in sudden, violent atmospheres. Weather kept them humble.... it was real muggy earlier, hot enough to cook a bear. Anyway, you get used a rapid weather change.” - Annie Proulx
23. “I didn't drive eleven hours across the state of Texas to watch my cholesterol.” - Robb Walsh
24. “It would be nice to think that the menacing aspects of North Korea were for display also, that the bombs and reactors were Potemkin showcases or bargaining chips. On the plane from Beijing I met a group of unsmiling Texan types wearing baseball caps. They were the 'in-country' team from the International Atomic Energy Agency, there to inspect and neutralize North Korea's plutonium rods. Not a nice job, but, as they say, someone has to do it. Speaking of the most controversial reactor at Yongbyon, one of the guys said, 'No sweat. She's shut down now.' Nice to know. But then, so is the rest of North Korean society shut down—animation suspended, all dead quiet on the set, endlessly awaiting not action (we hope) or even cameras, but light.” - Christopher Hitchens
25. “I feel like I've been ironing all day in high heels and no brassiere. ~Tizzy Donovan, Laid Out and Candle Lit” - Ann Everett
26. “No matter where you go in East Texas, ‘Deep’ East Texas is always about twenty miles further in than wherever you are.” - Markham Shaw Pyle
27. “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.” - Markham Shaw Pyle
28. “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.” - Markham Shaw Pyle
29. “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.” - Markham Shaw Pyle
30. “He was the deadliest man in Texas, on that they all agreed.” - James Carlos Blake
31. “We may be rats in a maze as far as the Obama administration is concerned, but in Texas, we are rats with a firm knowledge of just where the button is and how to push it. It helps us put up with all the nonsense and it would do the folks in Washington well to remember that. - Tom King ("Why the Secession Talk in Texas")” - Tom King
32. “Daddy had a strict rule about firearms. Anything we killed we had to eat. No amount of barbecue sauce would make a hairy guy like you palatable.” - Diane Kelly
33. “I'd learned how to handle a gun before I was fully potty trained.” - Diane Kelly
34. “At 6:15 she was standing on her front porch watering gardenias and watching another line of thunderstorms split and go around her. The same thing happened almost every day. Some days they came so close all she could smell was the rain. The wind whipped up dust from the fields until it drove like buckshot into the shuddering mesquites, and Clara Nell started to pray. 'Jesus,' she whispered. 'Jesus, Jesus....' But the only thing that came out of the sky was her topsoil. Every day the wind took a little more, and it hadn't rained in almost a year.” - Andrew Geyer
35. “Families start out, most of the time, with unconditional acceptance of one another. That acceptance starts in childhood and continues into adulthood. Somewhere in there, between childhood and adulthood, the ability to distinguish right versus wrong is born.” - Bart Hopkins