Top 100 Quotes About Aboriginal
#1. The coast of British Columbia was one of the three chief centers of aboriginal America.
Ellsworth Huntington
#2. I have Aboriginal roots on my father's side, and have always indentified with that spirit. I feel a lot of my music comes from that place.
Xavier Rudd
#3. You're very beautiful, dear', she said, 'what nationality are you, Indian?'
'No', I smiled, 'I'm Aboriginal.'
She looked at me in shock. 'You can't be,' she said.
'I am.'
'Oh, you poor thing,' she said, putting her arm around me, 'what on earth are you going to do?
Sally Morgan
#4. The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#5. In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.
Richard Flanagan
#6. Unlike aboriginal hunters, commercial seal hunters leave the carcasses on the ice to rot.
Paul Watson
#7. We still have disgraceful policies on asylum seekers and Aboriginal Australians continue to die in custody.
Justine Larbalestier
#8. The concepts of community and community life, have since the Dreaming, always held special significance for Aboriginal people because both provided the physical, cultural, spiritual and social environments, which supported children, young people, families and the aged.
Ken Wyatt
#9. I could see the combinations and permutations flutter through their minds. This was Boulder. It could easily be two moms. Two dads. A dad, a mom, and an orangutan. Three Amish hipsters and a transgendered Aboriginal mermaid.
Bill Konigsberg
#10. Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.
Charles Darwin
#11. My mum's from Broome, so I'm a saltwater person - Aboriginal people are either freshwater, saltwater or desert mob. So I always feel much more comfortable in close proximity to the beach, even if I'm not necessarily in the water.
Shari Sebbens
#12. The aboriginal peoples of Australia illustrate the conflict between technology and the natural world succinctly, by asking, 'What will you do when the clever men destroy your water?' That, in truth, is what the world is coming to.
Winona LaDuke
#13. As Aboriginal people we have always retained our resilience, our humour and our cultural integrity - we will always retain our dreams and a vision for the future for our people.
Ken Wyatt
#14. Aboriginal people have much to celebrate in this country's British heritage
Tony Abbott
#15. Over 120 Aboriginal communities run their own health services - some have been doing so for 30 years. They struggle with difficult medical problems. They also try to deal with counselling, stolen generations issues, family relationships, violence, suicide prevention.
Malcolm Fraser
#16. What is important is that I have been able to demonstrate to other women and also to Aboriginal people generally that Aboriginal people are capable of doing these things and women are capable of doing these things and Aboriginal women are capable of doing these things.
Pat O'Shane
#17. I've got tonnes of aboriginal and Native American art, but I'd like even more.
Tori Amos
#18. I've never been one to bow down to people who try to question my identity because I don't fit their mould of what an Aboriginal Australian is supposed to be or look like.
Shari Sebbens
#19. The adoration of the sun was one of the earliest and most natural forms of religious expression. Complex modern theologies are merely involvements and amplifications of this simple aboriginal belief.
Manly Hall
#20. The direction is going the right way for respect for aboriginal people in North America, and all we can do is stand up and say, 'Please do it faster.'
Robbie Robertson
#21. Long dismissed as children's stories or 'myths' by Westerners, Australian Aboriginal stories have only recently begun to be taken seriously for what they are: the longest continuous record of historic events and spirituality in the world.
Karl-Erik Sveiby
#22. The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.
Karl Marx
#23. Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena.
Terence McKenna
#24. In every civilized society there is found a race of men who retain the instincts of the aboriginal cannibal and live upon their fellow-men as a natural food.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#26. Most Australians live in the cities on the east coast, where contact between black and white occurred as much as 200 years earlier than on the west coast - and where 95 percent of Australians are able to live 95 percent of their lives without ever seeing an Aboriginal face.
Phillip Noyce
#27. Kids my age never left California. And here I was, going to school with Aboriginal kids in a dream-like location.
Dylan Penn
#28. The bat is the Aboriginal symbol of death. Did you know that? Harry did not.
Jo Nesbo
#29. I wasn't aware of the impact that I had made on the lives of Aboriginal people until I did a bit of travelling and visited various communities throughout Victoria. To see the way that my people looked at me and to know that I made a difference to them was an honour.
Lionel Rose
#30. The children, each of those kids is in touch with nature and traditional aboriginal culture so a very important part of getting performances from them was just letting them be and trying to capture the unique spirituality that was in each of them.
Phillip Noyce
#31. Sometimes the more you try to focus on something, the less you really see it's beauty.
- Burnum (Aboriginal Guide)
Samuel L. Norman
#32. Think of all the different features from Asian to African to Aboriginal to Caucasian. But we are all within the same species, Homo Sapiens.
Ray Comfort
#33. For Aboriginal leaders, the social and moral obligation that comes with community leadership is life-long. Those who lead, who have authority, must care for and look after those who come behind.
Patrick Dodson
#34. My best friend was Aboriginal. She taught me about 'bush tucker' - the food of the land, the different things you could eat if you got lost in the bush, like grasses and berries. There's this tree called the billygoat plum - the fruit is quite nice.
Isabel Lucas
#35. This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge ... It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature.
Henry David Thoreau
#36. The name Kylie can be used for Scrabble, as it is an aboriginal word for boomerang. Which is why Ms Minogue is so good at comebacks.
Kathy Lette
#37. We are so fortunate, as Australians, to have among us the oldest continuing cultures in human history. Cultures that link our nation with deepest antiquity. We have Aboriginal rock art in the Kimberley that is as ancient as the great Palaeolithic cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux in Europe.
Kevin Rudd
#38. We have copped a lot of ignorant abuse in the past, but it makes you wonder when a former state coroner openly attacks Aboriginal families who have been through hell.
Arthur Murray
#39. I grew up partially in Switzerland but mostly in Australia. I lived in Kakadu for a short time - it's an Aboriginal community. My best friend growing up was Aboriginal. She taught me so much.
Isabel Lucas
#40. I have researched aboriginal culture, Mayan hieroglyphics and the corporate culture of a Japanese car manufacturer, and I have written essays on the internal logic of various other societies, but I haven't a clue about my own logic.
Deborah Levy
#41. Australia's treatment of her Aboriginal people will be the thing on which the world will judge Australia and Australians - Not just now, but in the greater perspective of history.
Gough Whitlam
#43. The most dangerous thing is a bored teenager. They have the stigma of being Indigenous, Aboriginal, and all the trappings that come with it. The connection does come a lot more from those kids, desert or not. They're stepping out into the world.
Warwick Thornton
#44. The problem with politicians getting to know the issues in indigenous townships is that we tend to suffer from what Aboriginal people call the 'seagull syndrome' - we fly in, scratch around and fly out.
Tony Abbott
#45. All industry, not just the mining industry, can get out and give Aboriginal companies a chance.
Andrew Forrest
#46. Native people - about two-thirds of the uranium in the United States is on indigenous lands. On a worldwide scale, about 70 percent of the uranium is either in Aboriginal lands in Australia or up in the Subarctic of Canada, where native people are still fighting uranium mining.
Winona LaDuke
#47. It's very easy for Australians living in big cities to either romanticise or demonise the situation in Aboriginal places - to kind of look at things through the 'noble innocents' prism or through the 'chronically dysfunctional' prism, and I suspect that is so often the case.
Tony Abbott
#48. The aboriginal women leaders of Papunya - the Papunya Artists - performed a dance for me: the Honey Ant dance. They'd never done it for anyone else. They honoured me with a ceremonial stick that signifies the story of the land.
Quentin Bryce
#49. My dad taught me from my youngest childhood memories through these connections with Aboriginal and tribal people that you must always protect people's sacred status, regardless of the past.
Steve Irwin
#50. People look at me and they don't see what they think is a typical Aboriginal.
Shari Sebbens
#51. The obligations of citizens is to make it clear that Aboriginal issues are central to our public concerns, that we want them dealt with in a fully democratic context of openness and justice, that we will vote accordingly.
John Ralston Saul
#52. We owe the Aboriginal peoples a debt that is four centuries old. It is their turn to become full partners in developing an even greater Canada. And the reconciliation required may be less a matter of legal texts than of attitudes of the heart.
Romeo LeBlanc
#53. When I started school in 1958 there were no books written by Aboriginals in the school system and everything about Native life was written by white people through their eyes.
Now, Aboriginal writers can tell their stories. They have always been our narratives to tell, not others.
Rick Revelle
#54. Urban artist have to face the stigma not only from white Australia but black Australia too; that's horrific when people say that their art isn't "Aboriginal" if it doesn't have dots or lines or moieties in it.
Warwick Thornton
#55. It is my hope that I could be not just a Prime Minister, but a Prime Minister for Aboriginal affairs, the first I imagine that we've ever had.
Yitzhak Rabin
#56. My father is Indonesian Timorese, my mother Aboriginal Australian.
Jessica Mauboy
#57. Through the 1990s, the fracturing of Tasmanian Aboriginal politics was given impetus by the ongoing corruption of a number of black organisations started under federal government programmes, with large amounts of public money being lost.
Richard Flanagan
#58. If ever a place had a karma of damnation, it's Rottnest. And all those slick galleries selling Aboriginal art were eroding away my will to live. It's as if Germans built a Jewish food hall over Buchenwald.
David Mitchell
#59. I had spent some time in the outback, but to meet Aboriginals and work with them was wonderful. It gave me a great appreciation of how tough life is and about the indomitable spirit that the Aboriginal people have always possessed.
Hugh Jackman
#60. 'Gods of Wheat Street' has been described as an Aboriginal 'Neighbours' or 'Home and Away.' But on set, we were calling it 'Black to the Rafters.'
Shari Sebbens
#61. I know that a prime minister of Canada needs to be deeply respectful of the other levels of government - whether it be municipal, provincial, or even nation-to-nation relationships with aboriginal governments.
Justin Trudeau
#62. There may not be a great job for [Aboriginal people] but whatever there is, they just have to do it, and if it's picking up rubbish around the community, it just has to be done.
Tony Abbott
#63. These will suffice; who knows but we may be on a slope which leads down to
aboriginal savagery. But of this 1 am sure: if we are to escape, we must not yield a foot upon demanding a fair field and an honest race to all ideas.
Nelson Algren
#64. We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love ... and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal Proverb
A.B. Shepherd
#65. One of the first signs of a self-destructing aboriginal culture always seems to be an increase in the use of drugs and intoxicants,
David Weber
#66. Unfortunately for many Aboriginal people, of course, they've been in the situation of being herded on government reserves. Their own responsibility's been assumed by Protectors of Aborigines and by government officials and if you become part of that system, it's always difficult to break out of it.
Lowitja O'Donoghue
#67. Colors are primordial ideas, children of the aboriginal colorless light and its counterpart, colorless darkness Light, that first phenomenon of the world, reveals to us the spirit and the living soul of the world through colors.
Johannes Itten
#68. Even the Australians don't know how beautiful their own country is. Particularly where we were shooting 'The Straits.' Most of my stuff was done on an aboriginal settlement on the south shore, opposite Cairns, which I believe was the site where the last person was eaten in Australia.
Brian Cox
#69. Reconciliation will not work if it puts a higher value on symbolic gestures and overblown promises rather than the practical needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in areas like health, housing, education and employment.
Warren Mundine
#70. Prayers never bring anything ... They may bring solace to the sap, the bigot, the ignorant, the aboriginal, and the lazy - but to the enlightened it is the same as asking Santa Claus to bring you something for Xmas
W.C. Fields
#71. Yidaki didgeridoo has been used in every part of Australian regional culture, all around the country. It's become a message stick for the survival of those people, for aboriginal people and aboriginal culture.
Xavier Rudd
#72. The celebrated Aboriginal painter Albert Namatjira loved the Ghost Gums of the Northern Territory ... They are evocatively Australian, their white trunks contrasting with the red earth and the deep blue sky of the Dreamtime region that has for centuries sustained Namatjira's Aranda people.
Richard Allen
#73. The spirit of man is nomad, his blood bedouin, and love is the aboriginal tracker on the faded desert spoor of his lost self; and so I came to live my life not by conscious plan or prearranged design but as someone following the flight of a bird.
Laurens Van Der Post
#74. One of my earliest memories is being backstage at 'Bran Nue Dae' in Darwin when I was about eight. It's such a fun, happy show and a real celebration of being Aboriginal ... it felt really great and achievable as a career. It all felt normal.
Shari Sebbens
#75. Some people think that there aren't many Aboriginal actors around, and if there are, they're not that good. It's stupid. There's such an incredible pool of talent out there, and they're still coming out of drama schools. People just need to take a leap of faith.
Deborah Mailman
#76. We must start understanding other cultures, such as the Aboriginal culture. They have a harmony with the Earth and from that harmony has grown a certain spirituality.
Ian Cohen
#77. Aboriginal people are key because they have a different sense of where we belong and how we interact with nature.
David Suzuki
#79. I lived for a couple of years when I was 9 years old on beautiful Aboriginal sacred land in a town of a thousand people in northwestern Australia. It's where the Aborigines are still very connected to their culture, the Dreamtime culture. It was really quite a special experience.
Isabel Lucas
#80. I find it difficult to say I'm black first and a woman second or vice versa. I can't make that kind of distinction. Amongst Aboriginal women I do my best to raise their consciousness both as women and as Aboriginals.
Pat O'Shane
#81. It's an old Aboriginal word meaning 'Let's get together and have fun'. They gave us the word because they had no further need for it.
Barry Humphries
#82. I thought I smelled an early hint of the mysterious bittersweet gas that fills Pittsburgh in the summertime, a smell at once industrial and aboriginal, river water and sulfur dioxide, burning tires and the coat of a fox.
Michael Chabon
#83. And yet now and then he let himself steal a glance at her. Lovely dark colors of her skin, hair, and eyes. We are half-baked compared to them. Allowed out of the kiln before we were fully done. The old aboriginal myth; the truth, there.
Philip K. Dick
#84. Eraritjaritjaka albutjika
Nkinjaba iturala albutjika ...
His heart is filled with longing to turn for home
In the heat of the sun to return home ...
'Ulamba chant, Aboriginal Central Australia
Stuart Rintoul
#85. In many traditions, the world was sung into being: Aboriginal Australians believe their ancestors did so. In Hindu and Buddhist thought, Om was the seed syllable that created the world.
Jay Griffiths
#86. I'm going to win it for my country. I'm the first Aboriginal to win this. Isn't that something? I wish my Dad was alive to see it. He'd be as proud as I am.
Lionel Rose
#87. Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the things of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. We give our children guns and computer games, Wendy said. They gave their children the land.
Bruce Chatwin
#88. Genius ... arises in the natural, aboriginal concern for the conscious unity of all phenomena.
Mary Hunter Austin
#89. I don't have any pictures of the lovely Aboriginal people I met because they think it traps their spirit, and if they're correct then Facebook is basically creating a living hell. Which is really not that surprising, now that I say it out loud.
Jenny Lawson
#90. What I would like to see is sufficiently good education and health services being delivered to Aboriginal people so that they are prepared and ready to leave and join the economic mainstream if that's their choice.
Tony Abbott
#91. We also shot at a location that was an Aboriginal sacred ground for the shots coming up the cliff.
Christopher Atkins
#92. The largely hidden key to the symbolic world is time; indeed it is at the origin of human symbolic activity. Time thus occasions the first alienation, the route away from aboriginal richness and wholeness.
John Zerzan
#93. Yes, I am Aboriginal but I have the right to be avant-garde like any white artist.
Tracey Moffatt
#94. A lot of my identity as an Aboriginal person is about family.
Shari Sebbens
#95. Why isn't the fact that 100,000 women choose to end their pregnancies regarded as a national tragedy approaching the scale, say, of Aboriginal life expectancy being 20 years less than that of the general community?
Tony Abbott
#96. It's a really important thing for Aboriginal people to remember how stories are told and the power of stories, and make it an important feature in our world again.
Alexis Wright
#97. I'm getting offered roles that aren't designed for aboriginal people; they're designed for anybody. It's pretty surreal and mind-blowing.
Bronson Pelletier
#98. I speak of a Canada where men and women of aboriginal ancestry, of French and British heritage, of the diverse cultures of the world, demonstrate the will to share this land in peace, in justice and with mutual respect.
Pierre Trudeau
#99. Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.
Brad Jensen
#100. There was a feeling in him like waiting for a punishment.
Richard Wagamese
