Top 35 Mule Quotes

Throughout U.S. history, national crises have been used to suspend constitutional protections and attack basic rights. After the Civil War, with the nation in crisis, the promise of 40 acres and a mule to freed slaves was promptly betrayed.

Central African farmers don’t have any animal power because sleeping sickness kills all the animals – cattle, the horses, the burros and the mules. So draft animals don’t exist, and farming is all by hand, and the hand tools are hoes and machetes.

Horses and mules, and even sail cars, made more rapid progress than did the earliest locomotive.

As the facts change, change your thesis. Don’t be a stubborn mule, or you’ll get killed.

I’m just a pack mule. I’ve played leads and I’ve played character roles. Any actress in Hollywood will tell you as your age climbs, the leads thin.

This ‘Whoa, Nellie!’ thing is overrated. There were all kinds of stories going around. People said I had a mule in Georgia named Nellie. Well, we had a mule in Georgia, but her name was Pearl.

The North African mule talks always of his mother’s brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable.

Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: ‘Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?’

I developed my style by pickin’ a lot of cotton, plowin’ that ole mule every day. I just got the rhythm, and any rhythm I need I know where it is; I know where to find it.

I came home every Friday afternoon, riding the six miles on the back of a big mule. I spent Saturday and Sunday washing and ironing and cooking for the children and went back to my country school on Sunday afternoon.

I hate mules. I hate the noise when someone walks with mules. Clomp, clomp, clomp. I think it’s very not chic. I don’t even like a flip-flop. I don’t like this noise.

My biggest fear in life is living Nativity scenes. I hide in cars and drive around looking at them. Something about it is really scary to me. What parent would put their child in there with mules and camels and straw?

Folks are always talking about 40 acres and a mule, but what we need is some psychoanalysis. Forget 40 acres in a mule: sign all of us up for some shrinks so we can get ourselves right by reflecting and truly learning ourselves.

When I play, maybe ‘Back o’ Town Blues,’ I’m thinking about one of the old, low-down moments – when maybe your woman didn’t treat you right. That’s a hell of a moment when a woman tell you, ‘I got another mule in my stall.’

Some kinds of animals burrow in the ground; others do not. Some animals are nocturnal, as the owl and the bat; others use the hours of daylight. There are tame animals and wild animals. Man and the mule are always tame; the leopard and the wolf are invariably wild, and others, as the elephant, are easily tamed.

To sing like a hillbilly, you had to have lived like a hillbilly. You had to have smelt a lot of mule manure.

When I started at Pratt, Spike Lee had his 40 Acres and A Mule studios down the street. You’d see Rosie Perez walking around going to Mike’s Coffee Shop. So it was this black bohemian.

My great-grandfather was a coal miner, who worked in Pennsylvania mines when carts were pulled by mules and mines were lit by candles. Mining was very dangerous work then.

And we never got the mule, let alone the forty acres.

I spend most of hunting season at the ranch. We all love to hunt whitetails, and we have a pretty good supply in South Texas. I also love to hunt elk in Arizona, mule deer in Utah, and I’ve been to Canada to hunt caribou.

If you don’t have my army supplied, and keep it supplied, we’ll eat your mules up, sir.

I’m no fan of jam bands. You can take your Gov’t Mule, your Phish, your Rusted Root. But Derek Trucks is a special musician – perhaps the greatest slide guitarist who ever lived.

In 1964, when Lee Iacocca said, ‘Shelby, I want you to make a sports car out of the Mustang,’ the first thing I said was, ‘Lee, you can’t make a race horse out of a mule. I don’t want to do it.’ He said, ‘I didn’t ask you to make it; you work for me.’

We were in all four men with eight animals; for besides the spare horses led by Shaw and myself, an additional mule was driven along with us as a reserve in case of accident.

In Tennessee where I grew up, there were animals, farms, wagons, mules.

I have opinions on everything. I’m a stubborn old mule. The biggest problem is keeping my mouth shut.

Harness mules and oxen, but give a horse a chance to run.

I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go.

You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly.

I used to go to the stables and fool with the mules. My mother lived in constant fear that I might be brought home with a hoof print on my stomach.

If there is a specialty cocktail I enjoy, it’s the Moscow mule.

My earliest memory is learning to read ‘Muffin the Mule’ when I was about three.

While I was writing the songs for ‘Fuzz Universe,’ I was immersing myself in Bulgarian Female Choir music, Baroque lute and violin pieces, Johnny Cash songs about trains, cows, mules, and mining coal, the Bee Gees, and Ronnie James Dio.

I grew up like a lot of country boys and girls do – amongst the pine trees, dirt roads, farms, mules and people who were real.

My grandfather and my father had wheat ranches, so we had quite a few trucks around and a lot of mules. Talk about horsepower – we had mule power.