Top 100 Indian American Quotes
#1. As I've written more, and as other Indian American voices have grown around me, I strive harder to find experiences that are unique yet a meaningful and resonant part of the American story.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#2. I'm Indian-American and I think that when I think of myself as being culturally Indian, it had so much to do with when I lived with my parents and was a kid because they would take me to the Diwali festivals. They would take me to the temple, and they would teach me about all the different holidays.
Mindy Kaling
#3. Being Indian-American, I have tremendous potential to grow facial hair.
Vivek Murthy
#5. One hundred years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, the Spanish government issued a decree authorizing the enslavement of the American Indian as in accord with the law of God and man.
Nelson A. Miles
#7. I'm a member of the American Indian Movement, and I'm from the indigenous nations of the Western Hemisphere.
John Trudell
#8. The Trail of Tears has a great deal of meaning for every person of American Indian ancestry, whether they are Cherokee or not. For me, it has always stood for what is best and worst about the history of the United States.
Joseph Bruchac
#9. When a woman grabs my braids and says "How cute!" I crab her breast and say "How cute!" She never touches me again!
Russell Means
#10. The American Indian was an individualist in religion as in war. He had neither a national army nor an organized church.
Charles Eastman
#11. This country was a lot better off when the Indians were running it.
Vine Deloria Jr.
#12. I was born in Mumbai, but I grew up in England, and then my adulthood has been in the States. I'm an American stuffed with an English person with an Indian person inside. I feel like those things kind of inform me in some way, which I think helps me as an actor.
Aasif Mandvi
#13. Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.
Brad Jensen
#14. All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
#15. President Obama met with leaders of the American Indian tribes and they honored the president by giving him his own Indian name: Running Deficits.
Jay Leno
#16. To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical.
Vine Deloria Jr.
#17. All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian.
Pat Paulsen
#18. I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.
Zora Neale Hurston
#19. I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes.
Peter Matthiessen
#20. What we have done with the American Indian is its way as bad as what we imposed on the Negroes. We took a proud and independent race and virtually destroyed them. We have to find ways to bring them back into decent lives in this country.
Richard M. Nixon
#21. For a subject worked and reworked so often in novels, motion pictures, and television, American Indians remain probably the least understood and most misunderstood Americans of us all.
John F. Kennedy
#22. REPARTEE, n. Prudent insult in retort. Practiced by gentlemen with a constitutional aversion to violence, but a strong disposition to offend. In a war of words, the tactics of the North American Indian.
Ambrose Bierce
#23. My heart is so heavy when I see the reality of the Indian reservation and as an American, I know I am, too, responsible.
Maya Angelou
#25. It really was a hell of a motorcycle, ..It was arguably the first American motorcycle company, beating Harley by a year or so. Indian was the standard by which everything was gauged.
Jerry Springer
#26. Before you judge a person you have to walk in their moccasins and live in their lodge for a month.
Buddy Hannah
#27. Language is decanted and shared. If only one person is left alive speaking a language - the case with some American Indian languages - the language is dead. Language takes two and their multiples.
Rita Mae Brown
#28. I'm a first-generation American, so I had friends from several cultures while growing up, including Indian and Iranian friends.
Michael Steger
#29. They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. That nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side.
Sitting Bull
#30. Not surprisingly, thinkers from groups for whom whiteness was and is a problem have taken the lead in studying whiteness in this way. Such study began with slave folktales and American Indian stories of contact with whites.
David Roediger
#31. Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we're fascinated by the steadfastness of stars? The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so Swift and bright that no man could snare them.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#32. In Indian Country," he says, "we have a different sense of time. I'm learning and you're learning - and more will.
Gloria Steinem
#33. What helped me a lot was that I chose an American lead protagonist, because that liberated a lot from my own knowledge. If I had approached it from the perspective of an Indian main character, I think I would have assumed a lot of knowledge and I would have resented the presence of the author.
Karan Bajaj
#34. I sometimes think the contemporary white American is more culturally deprived than the Indian.
N. Scott Momaday
#35. The Indian navigator naturally distinguishes by a name those parts of a stream where he has encountered quick water and forks, andagain, the lakes and smooth water where he can rest his weary arms, since those are the most interesting and more arable parts to him.
Henry David Thoreau
#36. But undying memories stood like sentinels in her breast. When the notes of doves, calling to each other, fell on her ear, her eyes sought the sky, and she heard a voice saying, Majella!
Helen Hunt Jackson
#37. Growing up in the States, there's this part of me that's like, man, I'm Indian. Like, this is where I belong. And as soon as I got to India, and I had to go to the bathroom in some places, I was, like, 'Man - I am American.'
Hasan Minhaj
#38. I can still remember the feel in my hand of that most wonderful American coin ever minted, a nickel with a buffalo on one side and the head of an Indian on the other. That nickel was a daily proof of our country's past. Bring it back!
Paul Engle
#39. A great poet must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest, the touch of a blind man feeling the face of a darling child.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#40. According to court records, during the siege at Wounded Knee, more than two hundred and fifty thousand rounds were fired at our people by U.S. marshalls, FBI agents, the tribal police, the GOONs, and white vigilantes. These boys weren't kidding. And neither were we.
Leonard Peltier
#41. It takes a strong effort on the part of each American Indian not to become Europeanized. The strength for this effort can only come from the traditional ways, the traditional values that our elders retain.
Russell Means
#42. In 1776, at the point of severance, except for an infusion of words from east coast Indian languages, the English language of North America was not in any radical way dissimilar from that of what the American settlers called the mother country.
Robert Burchfield
#44. I think the worst one [indian mascot] is the Cleveland Indians' Big Chief Wahoo. It's just a red face on a baseball with a big, toothy grin. It's the Sambo of all other offensive mascots. I have never seen a Native American smile that hard before, not even at a casino opening.
Wanda Sykes
#45. I'm so tired of the left trying to divide us by race. One of the things I said today in my speech, we're not Indian-Americans, African-Americans, Irish-Americans, rich Americans, poor Americans. We're all Americans.
Bobby Jindal
#46. Who can declare that money is not a power which rulers of the world cannot withstand?
S. Alice Callahan
#47. I have a cousin who is a spiritual advisor for Native veterans in Canada, so I'm very familiar with the history of Natives in the military. And growing up as an American Indian myself, the story of Ira Hayes is one that is often told.
Adam Beach
#48. There is no man who is enterprising and keeps well up with the times but confesses that the women of to-day are in every respect, except political liberty, equal to the men.
S. Alice Callahan
#49. The 'Righteous' are mightier than 'God.
Shivish
#50. In terms of the revolution, I believe that the revolution will be a revolution of dispossessed people in this country: that's the Mexican American, the Puerto Rican American, the American Indian, and black people.
H. Rap Brown
#51. The whole Indian thing, I always say it's really the American holocaust. It's something we need to look at.
Skeet Ulrich
#52. Like almost everyone else in America, I grew up believing the myth of the objective scientist. Fortunately I was raised on the edges of two very distinct cultures, western European and American Indian ...
Vine Deloria Jr.
#53. I heard stories from my mother's mother who was an American Indian. She was spiritual, although she did not go to church, but she had the hum. She used to tell me stories of the rivers.
Tina Turner
#54. I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to ... vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding.
Adrienne Rich
#55. I am tired with hyphenated Americans! We are not Indian-Americans, or African-Americans.
Bobby Jindal
#56. The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of the pond, the smell of the wind itself cleansed by a midday rain, or scented with pinon pine. The air is precious to the red man, for all things are the same breath - the animals, the trees, the man.
Chief Seattle
#57. There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.
Bharati Mukherjee
#58. This is going to sound weird, but when I was a kid my old man used to tell us that he was a Sioux Indian warrior in his former life. Native American culture was always big in my house - I don't know why.
Marc Forgione
#60. My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#61. This is my love line ... It says an incredibly sexy, but totally infuriating redheaded woman with barge into my life and drive me insane.
Denise Grover Swank
#62. There is a lot of anxiety in India about writers selling out to foreign audiences, but I'm neither flattering the Indian audience nor the American audience. I'm uneasily somewhere in the middle.
Pankaj Mishra
#63. 'Deity' will be a compelling and exciting thriller with complex and interesting characters. A neo-realistic style to story and images will take the audience deep into Calcutta's many different levels. A fascinating clash between American and Indian culture.
Niels Arden Oplev
#64. I'm going to undress you slowly so I can take in every inch of your perfect body.
Holy shit, he played dirty.
Denise Grover Swank
#65. The White Man goes into his church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his tipi and talks with Jesus.
Quanah Parker
#66. For the American Indian, the ability of all creatures to share in the process of ongoing creation makes all things sacred.
Paula Gunn Allen
#67. I understand Los Angeles as a space where "real and imagined narratives overlap" in ways that disrupt both either/or dichotomies (Spanish or Indian, Mexican or American, Brown or White) and "linear historical understandings of this place and its people."22
David Samuel Torres-Rouff
#68. The American Indian, once proud and free, is torn now between White and tribal values; between the politics and language of the White man and his own historic culture. His problems, sharpened by years of defeat and exploitation, neglect and inadequate effort, will take many years to overcome.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#69. In fact, all known societies above the very primitive level have been slave societies - even many of the Northwest American Indian tribes had slaves long before Columbus's voyage.46 Amid this universal slavery, only one civilization ever rejected human bondage: Christendom. And it did it twice!
Rodney Stark
#70. Gandhi has more recently recognized the need for continuance of British, American and Chinese efforts in India and has suggested that these troops might remain by agreement with some new Indian Government.
Stafford Cripps
#71. I have long hair because I'm American Indian. I'm an Oklahoma boy, and I'm very proud of my heritage.
Christian Kane
#72. The statement 'There is nothing more American than an Indian' happens to be a multidimensional paradox. Try and not say too many of those. That might open your mind to ideas that could cause sanity point loss.
Charles Slagle
#73. Winston Churchill was not entirely British. His mother was American, making Sir Winston part Iroquois Indian.
Rachel Blanchard
#74. We are the land. To the best of my understanding, that is the fundamental idea that permeates American Indian life ...
Paula Gunn Allen
#75. So Indian policy has become institutionalized and the result has been that American people have become more dependent on government and that the American people have become more dependent on corporations.
Russell Means
#76. To understand American Indians is to understand America. This is the story of the paradoxically least and most American place in the twenty-first century. Welcome to the Rez.
David Treuer
#77. I think of myself as an Indian comedian, but I've had British and American schooling. I always had this feeling of not fitting in anywhere, of observing situations from the outside.
Vir Das
#78. It's just me and James walking and walking except he's on my back and his eyes are looking past the people who are looking past us for the coyote of our soul and the wolverine of our heart and the crazy crazy man that touches every Indian who spends too much time alone.
Sherman Alexie
#79. The [Apache] tribe was under siege by government agents, who had jailed some of the medicine men for practicing their rituals. Freedom of religion was cherished as a sacrosanct American right -- everywhere, that is, but on the archipelago of Indian life.
Timothy Egan
#80. Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the government
take care of him better take a closer look at the American Indian.
Henry Ford
#81. Next time! In what calendar are kept the records of those next times which never come?
Helen Hunt Jackson
#82. I've always been fascinated with the history of the Plains Indians and the history of the American Indian Movement in the '70s.
Jason Aaron
#83. Until America begins to build a moral record in her dealings with the Indian people she should not try to fool the rest of the world about her intentions on other continents. America has always been a militantly imperialistic world power eagerly grasping for economic control over weaker nations.
Vine Deloria Jr.
#84. It is important that Congress works to promote home ownership in Indian Country. These federal housing funds and programs will help young Native American families to stay on tribal lands in order to live, work and raise a family.
Rick Renzi
#85. Out of the Indian approach to life there came a great freedom, an intense and absorbing respect for life, enriching faith in a Supreme Power, and principles of truth, honesty, generosity, equity, and brotherhood as a guide to mundane relations.
Black Elk
#86. From my teenage years on, I sought out Native elders from many tribal nations and listened to their words. I also started a small press, The Greenfield Review Press, and became very involved with publishing the work of other American Indian authors, especially books of poetry.
Joseph Bruchac
#88. While American roads offer predictable safety, Indian roads compensate by providing unending entertainment, and even some opportunities for self growth. An Indian road is a stage where Life seems to be unabashedly living itself out.
Ajit Harsinghani
#89. By the eve of the American Revolution, a third of the native people in Rhode Island were enslaved. Indian bondage was more common still in the southern
Charles C. Mann
#90. The one thing I've always maintained is that I'm an American Indian. I'm not politically correct.
Russell Means
#91. The rise of the antiwar and civil rights movements, along with the emergence of radical groups such as the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and the American Indian movement, saw a return to systematized abuse within the prison system.
Chris Hedges
#92. With respect to the doctrine of a future life, a North American Indian knows just as much as any ancient or modern philosopher.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#93. They came with a Bible and their religion- stole our land, crushed our spirit ... and now tell us we should be thankful to the 'Lord' for being saved. Chief Pontiac, American Indian Chieftain
George Washington
#94. The Indian is one of Nature's gentlemen
he never says or does a rude or vulgar thing. The vicious, uneducated barbarians, who form the surplus of overpopulous European countries, are far behind the wild man in delicacy of feeling or natural courtesy.
Susanna Moodie
#95. The land is sacred. These words are at the core of your being. The land is our mother, the rivers our blood. Take our land away and we die. That is, the Indian in us dies.
Mary Brave Bird
#96. Compassion is not defined in one form. There's no Indian compassion. There's no American compassion. It transcends nation, the gender, the age. Why? Because it is there in everybody. It's experienced by people occasionally.
Dayananda Saraswati
#97. If ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi ... in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy them all.
Thomas Jefferson
#98. You gotta understand, my great-grandfather was German and Irish. My grandmother was Indian, and my grandfather was African-American, so we all got a little something in us.
Tracy Morgan
#99. I see, or at least it appears to me, that there is some concerted effort to discredit them, and categorize the American Indian Movement as some adverse entity, as opposed to it being a manifestation of the desperations of a whole race of people.
Leonard Peltier
#100. New York has her wilderness within her own borders; and though the sailors of Europe are familiar with the soundings of her Hudson, and Fulton long since invented the steamboat on its waters, an Indian is still necessary to guide her scientific men to its headwaters in the Adirondack country.
Henry David Thoreau
