Adventures in Library Land on a sunny April afternoon by Sarah Jewstein

I got books in today, and true to form, I must spend time looking through them before I release them into the (Oscar) wilde.
There is a book called the "State Directory of Elective Officials", and it contains all the state elected people, but also like state flowers and mottos.
Mottos are funny to me. My city's motto is "City of Living"; another close by is "City of Homes". Here are some of my favorite state mottos:

Arkansas--The people rule! (Ok, so I added the exclaimation point, but that is how I read it in my head)
Georgia--Wisdom, Justice and (Mullet) Moderation
Idaho--Let it be perpetual (What is it? Potatoes?)
Kansas--To the stars with difficulty (I read this as the paparazzi job description)
Maryland--Manly Deeds, Womanly Words (Huh?)
Michigan--If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you (I can't even figure out how to explain how sad that is to me somehow. Maybe because it is my state?)
New Hampshire--Live Free or DIE! (When I was in like 9th grade, I'd get stoned with my friend Kate and we'd read those Teen magazine "It Happened to Me" parts where the girls would be like "My bikini top fell off when I was diving at a pool party and all the popular boys saw me and laughed. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die." We laughed for like 5 hours about how extreme that was. Or it'd be like, "My mom held up tampons and asked if those were the kind I wanted just as a cute senior boy walked by. I wanted to kill her." The girl would murder her mother over tampons. Imagine if that was said seriously. I dunno. Maybe it was that we were stoned. Anyway, live free or die makes me think of that.)
North Carolina--To be rather than to seem (Dan Rather?)
Puerto Rico--John is Thy Name (Who is John? Can't it be Juan?)
Virginia--Thus always to tyrants (I think that is an old school way of saying "Stick It To The Man")

Fun stuff.