Native Quotes

#1. Back in New York I took full advantage of my status as a native speaker. I ran my mouth to shop clerks and listened in on private conversations, realising I'd gone an entire month without hearing anyone complaint that they were "stressed out".

David Sedaris

#2. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

Justin S. Holcomb

#3. Everyone is naked under his clothes and everyone is a foreigner outside his native lands.

Gisli Palsson

#4. We decipherers cannot afford to be as picky as the linguist, who can always run back to a native speaker for a few more forms.

E. J. W. Barber

#5. English is not merely a language anymore; it has become a way of life for millions of non-native English speakers around the world.

M.F. Moonzajer

#6. Hippodamus, son of Euryphon, a native of Miletus, invented the art of planning and laid out the street plan of Piraeus.

Aristotle.

#7. I cannot but be grieved to go from my native land, and especially from that part of it for whom and with whom I desired only to live; yet the dreadful apprehensions I have of what is coming upon this land may help to make me submissive to this providence, though more bitter.

Donald Cargill

#8. But the creative person is subject to a different, higher law than mere national law. Whoever has to create a work, whoever has tobring about a discovery or deed which will further the cause of all of humanity, no longer has his home in his native land but rather in his work.

Stefan Zweig

#9. Before me, my grandfathers, my uncles and my father were all boxers because Native Americans had to box in boarding schools. But in my time, when I grew up in Lawton Oklahoma, we didn't have boxing. I was a wrestler.

George Tahdooahnippah

#10. Walter, who had been in the lead all day, was the first to scramble up; a native Alaskan, he is the first human being to set foot upon the top of Alaska's great mountain, and he had well earned the lifelong distinction.

Hudson Stuck

#11. Historically speaking, we went from being Indians to pagans to savages to hostiles to militants to activists to Native Americans. Its five hundred years later and they still cant see us. We are still invisible.

John Trudell

#12. We are not better than native born Americans, and of course not smarter. We've just been to the last stop of this bus.

Sergei Dovlatov

#13. But it's not so much a headache as possession, my head an occupied territory, and my normal self, a disenfranchised native populace, driven underground.

Andrew Levy

#14. There's still racism. Western Europe ... has taken the native cultures of the Americas, the African cultures, the Asian civilization and lumped them together into The Others.

Hans Rosling

#15. The name 'reservation' has a negative connotation among Native Americans - an intern camp of sorts.

John Russell

#16. Technology is my native tongue. I'm online six hours a day.

Howard Rheingold

#17. This idea of the digital native in the bedroom taking down a fascist regime and building a billion-dollar company is a very attractive image, but actually, if you look at the research, young people are on the lowest rung of digital opportunity.

Beeban Kidron

#18. Genius is a native to the soil where it grows - is fed by the air, and warmed by the sun; and is not a hothouse plant or an exotic

William Hazlitt

#19. When you look at the Pueblo communities along the Rio Grande, when you talk to the Navajo people, the Ute people, and certainly the native peoples of California who still have their communities intact, it is what they have always known: that we are not apart from nature but a part of it.

Terry Tempest Williams

#20. I'm not encouraged by the silence. I can think of no benign reason for it. I'm afraid we may expect something closer to Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas than a scene from Close Encounters, and we all know how that turned out for the Native Americans.

Rick Yancey

#21. How very American it was to assume that these unsmiling Chinese would be pleased if one showed a preference for their native implements ... How very American it was to feel somehow guilty unless one struggled over rice noodles and lumps of meat with things that looked like enlarged knitting needles.

Tom Wolfe

#22. We're not Indians and we're not Native Americans. We're older than both concepts. We're the people, we're the human beings.

John Trudell

#23. Thomas slammed his fist on the table, sending eating utensils flying. "Shameful! It is downright shameful that so-called men of God would use religion to manipulate people."
--from Prairie Grace when Thomas learns how the Indian agents and others are stealing from Native Americans

Marilyn Bay Wentz

#24. Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home anymore, and am amazed by that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadian s abroad in America.

Jack Kerouac

#25. In America the Struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word "Fascism" and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor.

Sinclair Lewis

#26. In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age.

William James

#27. After asking Humphrey to name his native city, Khrushchev bounced to his feet and drew a bold blue circle around Minneapolis on a map of the United States hanging on his wall - "so that I don't forget to order them to spare the city when the rockets fly.

Frederick Kempe

#28. The country in which I live is not my native country, that lies elsewhere, and it must always be the center of my longings.

Therese Of Lisieux

#29. Why were there far more species of domesticated animals in Eurasia than in the Americas? The Americas harbor over a thousand native wild mammal species, so you might initially suppose that the Americas offered plenty of starting material for domestication.

Jared Diamond

#30. There may be 300,000 apps for the iPhone and iPad, but the only app you really need is the browser. You don't need an app for the web ... You don't need to go through some kind of SDK ... You can use your web tools ... And you can publish your apps to the BlackBerry without writing any native code.

Jim Balsillie

#31. The original settlers in Iceland were the nobles of Norway who left their native land to avoid the tyranny of Harold Fairhair, who tried to crush their power so as to make himself a despotic king in the land.

Sabine Baring-Gould

#32. My native land, good night!

Lord Byron

#33. Base men being in love have then a nobility in their natures more than is native to them.

William Shakespeare

#34. To be successful in my native France, where people speak the same language and understand me, is nothing.

Edith Piaf

#35. I always think of the Pacific Northwest as giant trees and rain and clouds and dampness, like the Native American art from that area. That all says Pacific Northwest to me. Salmon. It really only exists on the Western side of the Cascades.

Kyle MacLachlan

#36. I'm interested only in buying land in my native Hawaii so that one day I can live there and have the space to rescue animals.

Marie Helvin

#37. So many of my thoughts and feelings are shared by the English that England has turned into a second native land of the mind for me.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#38. Don't think I am not homesick for America. I say 'homesick' advisedly because I am a man with two homes - America, which gave me hospitality for many happy years, and where my daughter was born; and my native England.

Leslie Howard

#39. How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.

Mary Shelley

#40. The nostalgic is never a native but a displaced person who mediates between the local and the universal.

Svetlana Boym

#41. I'm even taller in person, because photographs shrink you down and steal your soul native american.

Thom Yorke

#42. The best translations cannot convey to us the strength and exquisite delicacy of thought in its native garb, and he to whom such books are shut flounders about in outer darkness.

Edwin Booth

#43. When old settlers say 'One has to understand the country,' what they mean is, 'You have to get used to our ideas about the native.' They are saying in effect, 'Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out; we don't want you.'

Doris Lessing

#44. With the computer and programming languages, mathematics has newly-acquired tools, and its notation should be reviewed in the light of them. The computer may, in effect, be used as a patient, precise, and knowledgeable "native speaker" of mathematical notation.

Kenneth E. Iverson

#45. Happily for us, the fundamental Christian message concerns not what we ought to do, but what God has done and what God is willing to do. In fellowship with Him and with others who are likewise trying to be like Him, we can be lifted up above our native possibilities ...

Hugh Martin

#46. The native American has been generally despised by his white conquerors for his poverty and simplicity.

Charles Eastman

#47. Peoples, populations, native populaces, tribes and religious communities are not nations, even though they are often spoken of as such.

Shlomo Sand

#48. Yes, we become stronger when black and whites, Latino, Asian American, Native American, when all of us stand together.

Bernie Sanders

#49. I think people should look at learning about Native American history the same as visiting Washington, D.C., and seeing the monuments there. It's all part of the package.

Chaske Spencer

#50. The American feels too rich in his opportunities for free expression that he often no longer knows what he is free from. Neither does he know where he is not free; he does not recognize his native autocrats when he sees them.

Erik Erikson

#51. I believe it is my responsibility to do what I can for children and people with Down syndrome as well as in my native Dominican Republic.

Albert Pujols

#52. We, Brandy and Alfa and me, we've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.
I have no native tongue.

Chuck Palahniuk

#53. My beautiful, my own
My only Venice-this is breath! Thy breeze
Thine Adrian sea-breeze, how it fans my face!
Thy very winds feel native to my veins,
And cool them into calmness!

Lord Byron

#54. I had a desire to see something besides my own shores, if only to be content to return to them someday. If I wish to live in my native land and love her, it should not be out of ignorance.

Margaret George

#55. Our forests are not for toilet paper. They are worth more standing than cut. That deserves to be defended, not only by native peoples but also by environmentalists.

Winona LaDuke

#56. Now, we're Americans. Technically, who is from this country? Only the Indians, who we graciously let dwell on their native casinos.

Greg Proops

#57. The deluded mind is the mind affectively burdened by intellect. Thus, it cannot move without stopping and reflecting on itself. This obstructs its native fluidity.

Bruce Lee

#58. Cultural appropriation is especially egregious when it involves the co-optation of spiritual ceremonies and the inappropriate use of lands deemed sacred by Native peoples.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

#59. Ye mariners of England! That guard our native seas; Whose flag has braved a thousand years, The battle and the breeze!

Thomas Campbell

#60. The best prophet is common sense, our native wit.

Euripides

#61. No jury, we knew, could convict a man on the criminal count on native evidence in a land where you can buy a murder-charge, including the corpse, all complete for fifty-four rupees

Rudyard Kipling

#62. But his singing was unconscious and irrepressible - an expression of his native exuberance, the dreamy, buoyant soundtrack running through his head.

Jennifer Haigh

#63. I know what it's like to be different. I'm a Native American in a white world.

Tamara Hoffa

#64. So the loud torrent, and the whirlwind's roar, But bind him to his native mountains more.

Oliver Goldsmith

#65. You love trickery."
"I love puzzles. Trickery is just my native tongue.

Leigh Bardugo

#66. The digitally native generation has no idea what has been lost to the freedom of intimacy that has no fear of being recorded.

Tina Brown

#67. The African, because of the violent differences between what was native and what he was forced to in slavery, developed some of the most complex and complicated ideas about the world imaginable.

Amiri Baraka

#68. This traditional woman grew up in a world where respect for the animals hunted was of paramount importance. A concept that, in many cases, differentiates the native from the non-native hunter.

Ray Mears

#69. Even to this day, no native Australian animal species and only one plant species-the macadamia nut-have proved suitable for domestication. There still are no domestic kangaroos.

Jared Diamond

#70. My native tense is future conditional, a low simmer of unspecified worry being the usual condition.

Michael Pollan

#71. The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island.

John Millington Synge

#72. I'm a native New Yorker, so I'm edgier; I kind of tell it like it is.

Kara DioGuardi

#73. There are better mothers than disaster. A native land is the best of all mothers. We American Jews have a native land we love. But it is even better to have a native land who loves us.

Louis D. Brandeis

#74. YOU CANNOT THINK YOURSELF INTO RIGHT LIVING. YOU LIVE YOURSELF INTO RIGHT THINKING. - Native Elders

Gloria Steinem

#75. Many people love grey squirrels, but the reality is that they are a real problem for some of our most threatened native species, like the red squirrel and dormouse. It is not realistic, practical or even desirable to completely eradicate grey squirrels, but we must control them effectively.

Jim Knight

#76. For me, chess is a language, and if it's not my native tongue, it is one I learned via the immersion method at a young age.

Garry Kasparov

#77. For decades, as literary editor, I have followed the growth of our creative writing in English. In my Solidaridad Bookshop, half of my stock consists of Filipino books written in English and in the native languages.

F. Sionil Jose

#78. I sang a song in Hindi; nobody even knew what that was. Singing about Native American issues, nobody did that. I had no reason to want to copy anybody else. All I had was my originality.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

#79. Tom Stoppard's other work includes: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, After Magritte, The Real Thing, Enter A Free Man, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink (a stage adaptation of his own play, In the Native State) and The Invention of Love. Arcadia

Tom Stoppard

#80. There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

Steven Pinker

#81. True gentleness is founded on a sense of what we owe to him who made us and to the common nature which we all share. It arises from reflection on our own failings and wants, and from just views of the condition and duty of man. It is native feeling heightened and improved by principle.

Hugh Blair

#82. I've always liked country music. It's a certain aspect of America that goes back to the British Isles and the influence is very native to America.

Robert Duvall

#83. I want the seals of power and place, the ensigns of command, charged by the people's unbought grace, to rule my native land. Nor crown, nor scepter would I ask but from my country's will, by day, by night, to ply the task her cup of bliss to fill.

John Quincy Adams

#84. There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is; keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.

Aldo Leopold

#85. No one would stand for it [being the fool in the media] in a minute if you took any other group -Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanics, women - but somehow it's okay to do that with hillbillies.

John Shelton Reed

#86. What you have in your mind, your talents, your native abilities, no one can take from you. When you die, you take them with you. Use them diligently while you are here.

Alfred Armand Montapert

#87. Moon is also a naive native girl when she sets out for Carbuncle.

Joan D. Vinge

#88. Working on the native-herb garden in the front corner of the yard. Already thriving: thyme, hyssop, spearmint, lemon balm, fennel, chamomile, marjoram. Must add: lavender, ambrosia, valerian, mugwort, pennyroyal, gillyflower, and (when it's warmer) sweet basil.

Neal Stephenson

#89. By the time the last of these relationships ended I was such a quaking mass of colliding, exploding neurotransmitter malfunctions that the only coherent sentence I could form in my native tongue went: Never again.

Merrill Markoe

#90. People like head trauma. They love knockouts. The crowd is silent, silent, silent ... and then a knockout happens, and everyone goes native. There would be far fewer knockouts without the gloves.

Jonathan Gottschall

#91. Critics have called alien epic 'Avatar' a version of 'Dances With Wolves' because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy.

Annalee Newitz

#92. Translators need a lot of skills besides fluency in at least two languages; translators need to be excellent writers in their native language and need to be interested in and skilled at terminology research using both paper dictionaries and the Internet.

Corinne McKay

#93. There is no place in this world warmer than our native land.

Khem Veasna

#94. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt

Jesse Jackson

#95. American football seems to resemble soccer in that one scores by putting the ball through the opponent's goal; but football, truly is about land. The Settlers want to move the line of scrimmage Westward, the Native Americans want to move it East.

David Mamet

#96. I'm not a xenophobe - I think immigration is a good thing for most countries - but they transmute the foibles of their native tongues into English in a way that's difficult to figure out.

Conrad Black

#97. This is what extremely grieves us, that a man who never fought Should contrive our fees to pilfer, on who for his native land Never to this day had oar, or lance, or blister in his hand.

Aristophanes

#98. I've come to the point in my life where I encourage young Native Americans to become much more selfish about their personal needs and wants.

Sherman Alexie

#99. Unless you're one of the first Americans, a Native American, you came from someplace else. Somebody brought you.

Barack Obama

#100. It is wrong to divide the nation white against black, native born against immigrant or one religion against another. It is also wrong to divide people by income. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Obama divides Americans against each other. This is wrong.

Grover Norquist