Native Quotes

#1. There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.

Mark Twain

#2. Give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.

Native American Saying

#3. The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings as in his native land.

Emma Goldman

#4. The only good Indian is a dead Indian

William Tecumseh Sherman

#5. The love for our native land strengthens our individual and national character.

Alexander Hamilton

#6. But in the South, our smiles are our weapons and only a native knows a snarl from sincerity.

Alessandra Torre

#7. Your story isn't powerful enough if all it does is lead the horse to water; it has to inspire the horse to drink, too. On social media, the only story that can achieve that goal is one told with native content.

Gary Vaynerchuk

#8. The native music of North America, the original-roots music of this country, is also the underworld music of this country.

Robbie Robertson

#9. Life is greater than you have ever known it.

Ernest Holmes

#10. I'm a one-hundred-percent, made-in-Florida, dope-smugglin', time-sharin', spring-breakin', log-flumin', double-occupancy discount vacation. I'm a tall glass of orange juice and a day without sunshine. I'm the wind in your sails, the sun on your burn and the moon over Miami. I am the native.

Tim Dorsey

#11. Look through the prayer books. You'll see lots of dates. You'll see names of Native Americans remembered. This was an open-sourcing project among so many people.

Shane Claiborne

#12. Where lurk sweet echoes of the dear homevoices, Each note of which calls like a little sister, Those airs slow, slow ascending, as the smokewreaths Rise from the hearthstones of our native hamlets Cyrano Act 5.

Edmond Rostand

#13. You got what you deserved. Now be a man and confess to what most of us already know.

Stacy Buck

#14. What's it mean; are you determined
To make modern all mankind?
If so, you should be be-sermoned
And brought back to healthy mind.

Charles C. Abbott

#15. I'm Native American, so it's in my blood to always want brothers and friends. I'm a good brotherhood guy.

Duane Chapman

#16. You all know from past experiences that the white man only sees the bad that our people do to them. They are blind to their own indiscretions.

Violetta Botzet Luetgers

#17. 1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime (and that figure is certainly higher as Native women often do not report rape); 86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults upon Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men; few are prosecuted.

Louise Erdrich

#18. Architecture has its political Use; publick Buildings being the Ornament of a Country; it establishes a Nation, draws People and Commerce; makes the People love their native Country, which Passion is the Original of all great Actions in a Common-wealth ... Architecture aims at Eternity.

Christopher Wren

#19. One could reasonably argue that the Turkish pogrom against the Armenians during World War I qualifies as a crime against humanity, as does the United States' ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.

Sebastian Junger

#20. When I was a kid, I really loved Indians. Native Americans. Pardon. Me.

Dave Attell

#21. Work is honorable. It is good therapy for most problems. It is the antidote for worry. It is the equalizer for deficiency of native endowment. Work makes it possible for the average to approach genius. What we may lack in aptitude, we can make up for in performance ...

J. Richard Clarke

#22. Where no one intrudes, many can live in harmony.

Chief Dan George

#23. Native Americans are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go to have a good time and see exotic cultures. "What we have done to the peoples who were living in North America" is, according to anthropologist Sol Tax, "our Original Sin.

James W. Loewen

#24. The various processes of belief acquisition which are native to a species include ones which may allow for the reliable pick-up of information, which, in turn, allows individual members of the species to successfully negotiate their environment and satisfy their various desires.

Hilary Kornblith

#25. The more I heard, the more I've learned, and the more I saw, the more resolved I became about helping to address the challenges that plague the Native American community.

Daniel Snyder

#26. He had never known a "kind woman friend" in his native parts. He had not had the time to fall in love.

Victor Hugo

#27. In Native spiritualities, there is often a belief that we cannot pray unless we've laughed.

Gloria Steinem

#28. It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

Mark Twain

#29. The problem is, we're all using social networks as distribution instead of native platforms to actually tell stories.

Gary Vaynerchuk

#30. I love Caribbean food. It's a great melting pot of so many cultures including the Native Americans.

Bob Greene

#31. Being a native of Spain, the country to which I owe much of my education and cultural background, I was deeply influenced by my great predecessor Santiago Ramon y Cajal.

Severo Ochoa

#32. Hiking is like life...
You can spend the whole trip just watching the trail ahead, worrying that you'll twist an ankle or fall.
And then you miss all this.

Susannah Scott

#33. You will, I trust, resemble a forest plant, which has indeed, by some accident, been brought up in the greenhouse, and thus rendered delicate and effeminate, but which regains its native firmness and tenacity, when exposed for a season to the winter air.

Walter Scott

#34. I continue to be surprised by judgmental native stereotypes and apathy, but if I wasn't that would mean I'd become accustomed and tolerant. I don't want to stop being surprised. I just want them to stop.

Red Haircrow

#35. Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans.

Russell Means

#36. The conditions of our knowledge of the native religion of early Rome may perhaps be best illustrated by a parallel from Roman archaeology.

Cyril Bailey

#37. Trickery is not my native tongue, but I may learn to speak it yet.

Leigh Bardugo

#38. Tis often seen
Adoption strives with nature; and choice breeds
A native slip to us from foreign lands.

William Shakespeare

#39. We do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. How can you buy them from us?

Chief Seattle

#40. To a wise man, the whole earth is open; for the native land of a good soul is the whole earth.

Democritus

#41. The outward light is but a reflection of the inner.

Anasazi Foundation

#42. They say there are about 12 million illegal immigrants in this country. But if you ask a Native American, that number is more like 300 million.

David Letterman

#43. 'Banished men should never speak their native tongue; it comes bitter from their mouth. And this language suits a traitor better, I think; drips off one's teeth like sugar-syrup.'

Ursula K. Le Guin

#44. 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

#45. The bodies of the dead, even of a savage enemy shall not be subjected to indignities by civilized and Christian men.

H.S. Jarrett

#46. The people setting out on these walks weren't seeking to conquer peaks or test themselves against maps and miles. They were looking for a mystical communion with the land; they walked backwards in time to an imagined past suffused with magical, native glamour:

Helen Macdonald

#47. At noon I observed a bevy of nude young native women bathing in the sea, and I went and sat down on there clothes to keep them from being stolen.

Mark Twain

#48. The most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants.

Henry David Thoreau

#49. I've always been interested in the history of the West, our country and particularly as it relates to the Native Americans - the original Americans.

Beau Bridges

#50. I feel strongly that we need the young people of today to become the scientists and the engineers of tomorrow so that my native United States continues to be a world leader in discovery and innovation. If we suppress science in this country, we are headed for trouble.

Bill Nye

#51. Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.

Brad Jensen

#52. I have heard that in the New Zealand native tradition, the soul, when it dies, becomes a star.

Eleanor Catton

#53. The love we have for our native land would be good and praiseworthy if it did not degenerate, as we see it does everywhere, into vanity, the spirit of predominance, acquisitiveness, hate, envy, nationalism, and militarism

Henri Barbusse

#54. I find web browsing, checking multiple email accounts, and Google mapping rather tiresome on an iPhone - the iPhone's native interface, for all its supposed perfection, has all kinds of wrong baked in - and the screen is just far too small.

John Battelle

#55. And Americans realized that native people are still here, that they have a moral standing, a legal standing.

Dennis Banks

#56. The Talmud states, "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

Bridges McCall

#57. I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.

F. Sionil Jose

#58. I've never known a Philadelphian who wasn't a downright 'character'; possibly a defense mechanism resulting from the dullness of their native habitat.

Anita Loos

#59. Our native soil draws all of us, by I know not what sweetness, and never allows us to forget.

Ovid

#60. I believe the United States should allow all foreigners in this country, provided they can speak our native language ... Apache.

Steve Martin

#61. One of the things I've been taught by Native American elders is the importance of patience, of waiting to do things when the time is right.

Joseph Bruchac

#62. The only people that deserve to be called Americans are Native Americans, otherwise, I'm a Latino American, you know ... Anybody else ... well where did you come from?

Cristian Machado

#63. Do not take advantage of foreigners who live among you in your land. 34 Treat them like native-born Israelites, and love them as you love yourself. Remember that you were once foreigners living in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.

Anonymous

#64. When the sun died, I went up to heaven and saw God and all the people who had died a long time ago. God told me to come back and tell my people they must be good and love one another, and not fight, or steal, or lie. He gave me this dance to give to my people.

Wovoka

#65. Officers have been trying for hundreds of years to outsmart soldiers and have still not learned that it cannot be done. We can always count on the native ingenuity of the American GI to save us from ourselves, and to win wars.

Colin Powell

#66. Go and be fish again.

Ernest J. Gaines

#67. Like an unfinished symphony, her story played on my mind for most of my life. It would rock to the tune of the passage of time, an adagio of high notes, low notes an illusive movements. Then when I least expected it, I happened upon the missing notes in the life of Charlotte Howe Taylor.

Sally Armstrong

#68. We sack, we ransack to the utmost sands
Of native kingdoms, and of foreign lands:
We travel sea and soil; we pry, and prowl,
We progress, and we prog from pole to pole.

Francis Quarles

#69. We also recommit to supporting tribal self-determination, security, and prosperity for all Native Americans. While we cannot erase the scourges or broken promises of our past, we will move ahead together in writing a new, brighter chapter in our joint history.

Barack Obama

#70. A South Carolina native, Miles was a lawyer, a mayor of Charleston, and a congressman. He was one of his state's "fire-eaters," a term applied to men who openly advocated secession rather than finding accomodation with the Union in the summer and fall of 1860.

Clint Johnson

#71. My mother is Greek and my father is Bulgarian. I am a first-generation American and native Los Angeleno. I was born and raised in Hollywood.

Rita Wilson

#72. How can scholars continue to honor the unique and important histories of individual tribal nations and Indian communities while simultaneously drawing attention to ways that the nineteenth-century Native experiences shaped the United States in profound ways?

C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa

#73. We do not admire their president.
We know why the White House is white.
We do not find their children irresistible;
We do not agree they should inherit the earth.

Alice Walker

#74. Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.

Czeslaw Milosz

#75. In the true sense one's native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.

Emma Goldman

#76. I have good genes. My father is Danish and my mother is Irish and Native American. They both have good skin.

Virginia Madsen

#77. When I was a kid growing up in Cleveland, I believed - completely, wholeheartedly, without reservation or pause - that the Cleveland Indians were named to honor a Native American ballplayer named Louis Sockalexis, who played for Cleveland in the late 19th Century.

Joe Posnanski

#78. Kids could and did swim in it happily as in their native element, at least until some teacher or professor told them they had to come out, dry off, and breathe modernism ever after.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#79. The Holy Land is everywhere

Black Elk

#80. At the time, Alcatraz had been taken over by Native Americans who were protesting against a long series of broken treaties, genocidal policies, and racist exploitation.

Assata Shakur

#81. And although like most black males raised in Los Angeles, I'm bilingual only to the extent that I can sexually harass women of all ethnicities in their native languages, I understood the gist of the message.

Paul Beatty

#82. The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element.

Cormac McCarthy

#83. I speak as your native guide to the mysterious tribe called the English. Dress code is everything. You can be a card-carrying Nazi, you can pay gigolos to eat gnocchi out of your navel and you won't be pilloried
as long as you never, ever wear linen with tweed.

Kathy Lette

#84. If you're Native American and you pray to the wolves, you're a savage. If you're African and you pray to your ancestors, you're a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that's just common sense.

Trevor Noah

#85. Gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and only lowborn metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica.

Mark Twain

#86. The wolf turned to Rachel. She was afraid to run, afraid fleeing would make it chase her. Somewhere in the stored files of her mind, she remembered one should not look directly at a menacing dog, but she couldn't take her eyes from it.

G.G. Collins

#87. To be authentic is literally to be your own author, to discover your own native energies and desires, and then to find your own way of acting on them.

Warren G. Bennis

#88. My forefathers didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat.

Will Rogers

#89. Dieter, you're a brick!" I shouted. I couldn't help it. Dieter looked as pleased as punch. To him, being called a brick by an English native was probably more precious than a knighthood.

Alan Bradley

#90. Westerners who go native with Chinese ideas are called 'eggs' - outside white, inside yellow -, and are often systematically excluded from their expat community's activities, let alone the financial support system.

Thorsten J. Pattberg

#91. The romantic myth of the artist says that you are the Source. I have no illusion about that. Native Americans don't believe they are the Source. They have access to the Source. Endless access. But don't get confused.

Tori Amos

#92. We must be willing to begin with positive teaching, not with negative prohibitions, and be content to wait and to watch whilst the native Christians slowly recreate their own customs as the Spirit of Christ gradually teaches them ...

Roland Allen

#93. The girl was cinnamon colored in the way of Native America after it had been raped by Europe.

Walter Mosley

#94. War is honorable
In those who do their native rights maintain;
In those whose swords an iron barrier are
Between the lawless spoiler and the weak;
But is, in those who draw th' offensive blade
For added power or gain, sordid and despicable
As meanest office of the worldly churl.

Joanna Baillie

#95. But as he no longer stands on his native soil, his art can't possibly have roots. An artist creates true art for his people only as long as he lives, and suffers, among them.

Olga Grushin

#96. We already knew that kids learned computer technology more easily than adults, It is as if children were waiting all these centuries for someone to invent their native language.

Jaron Lanier

#97. In the native world, major gods come in trios, duos, and groups. It is the habit of non-natives to discover the supreme being, the one and only head god, a habit lent to them by monotheism.

Paula Gunn Allen

#98. It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.

Louise Erdrich

#99. Here, we tell the story: why the people came here, what they did when they got here, going back to the Native Americans and coming all the way forward.

Robert Patterson

#100. The land is always there...it is you who has to return

Munia Khan