Ralph Stanley Quotes

I grew up in Palestine, West Virginia, which is mostly a farming community; there aren't a lot of jobs.

There are a lot of regulations that are really just crushing jobs. Look at the coal miners in the Rust Belt that are getting out of work. Look at the - look at the loggers and the timber workers and the paper mills in the West Coast. Look at the ranchers or farmers in the Midwest with regulations.

When my father started talking about strip mining in the Appalachia back in the '60s, I remember a conversation I had with him where he said, you know, this is the richest state in the country if you look at the resources and the land, but the poorest people after the state of Mississippi: the 49th poorest people in the country.

I'm from Middlesboro, Ky., a little town on the Tennessee and Virginia border.

I'm a native West Virginian and I've been called everything from a hillbilly to a stump jumper. I'm always proud of it; I'm very proud to be a West Virginian.

I grew up in Southern Oregon. My father was a sawmill worker and a logger, and his job put food on the table.

We were growing up in West Virginia. Everybody was poor there in the southern part of the state. It was like growing up in the Great Depression from the stories I hear people tell. Everybody was poor and so we didn't know that we were any different from anybody else.

All over Russia, spades are worn out, men are plowing with burnt staves instead of with plowshares, scratching the surface of the ground, and instead of harrowing with a steel-spiked harrow of some weight, are brushing the ground with light constructions of wooden spikes bound together with wattles.

The coal industry held the title deed to the future and devoured the land, people, and culture with a Satanic appetite.

Appalachia, my state, eastern Kentucky, has a large amount of poverty.

Well, you know, my grandmother actually grew up, you know, her whole family, my mom's family outside of Parkersburg, West Virginia.

I come from the coal fields.

I grew up listening to my dad, a miner who rose through the ranks to be the mine superintendent in Coalwood, W.V., yelling orders into his black company phone. He wanted to get coal out of the ground and into coal cars and on its way to steel mills.

But, dear God, don't listen to me. I'm an old lady in the middle of nowhere without a real toilet.

Congo is one of the least-developed countries in the world, and has millions of acres of virtually untouched forest.

If you can imagine the area and the land in Cambodia, I mean there are hardly any roads in big parts of the country. The roads they have, in the rainy season, become just mud. So, if you’re somebody that has just one leg, or blind with no arms and you have children and you’re trying to work, and earn some money, and take care of your home, it’s hard enough to be a parent and do all of that normally.

Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong

The challenges facing our country today, I think, have even more even to do with America's place in the world, with a struggling economy that isn't producing the jobs that Americans long to see, with the kind of economic policies that seem to have other countries winning and America losing.

I'm not concerned about the very poor, we have a safety net there, if we need to repair, I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich, they're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who are struggling, and I'll continue to take that message across the country.

The economic base of that rural Oregon area used to be manufacturing and logging. And that went away and they feel nobody has been speaking to them and finally Donald Trump has spoken to them.

Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.

I grew up in the south, poor - on rock, dirt roads.

If your Income Taxes go to help out the less fortunate, there could be no legitimate kick against it in the world. This is becoming the richest, and the poorest Country in the world. Why? Why, on account of an unequal distribution of the money.

I believed Afghanistan was always going to be hard. It's the fifth poorest country in the world. And when you fly over it, you realize that there's not much there. And, of course, it has the problem, too, of being on that border with Pakistan in basically an ungoverned region that has given the terrorists a staging ground. So it's a very difficult place. But I do believe that the mission there can succeed if success is defined as helping the Afghans to prevent the Taliban from being an existential threat to the Afghan government.