Top 100 Tribal Quotes
#1. Jehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest.
E. O. Wilson
#2. In recent years, the choice of drugs on these reservations and throughout my district has been methamphetamines. It has destroyed the rule of law among the reservation people. It is killing our tribal youth in this country.
Rick Renzi
#3. The problems of tribal conflicts in Kenya are much older, caused by the former colonial power. A former American ambassador there once wrote about how the CIA has contributed to the divisions between Kenyans.
Yoweri Museveni
#4. City wisdom became almost entirely centered on the problems of human relationships, in contrast to the wisdom of any natural tribal group, where relationships with the rest of the animate and inanimate world are still given due place.
James E. Lovelock
#5. The FBI continues to work with tribes through the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 to help tribal governments better address the unique public safety challenges and disproportionately high rates of violence and victimization in many tribal communities.
James Comey
#6. I believe the Republicans have never thought that democracy was anything but a tribal myth.
Hunter S. Thompson
#7. I lived in grass huts in a jungle in the Philippines for three weeks with tribal people.
Evangeline Lilly
#8. We celebrate Thanksgiving along with the rest of America, maybe in different ways and for different reasons. Despite everything that's happened to us since we fed the Pilgrims, we still have our language, our culture, our distinct social system. Even in a nuclear age, we still have a tribal people.
Wilma Mankiller
#9. Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal, which we all want to surpass, and some don't.
Todd Gitlin
#10. The genocide [in Rwanda] was not a spontaneous eruption of tribal hatred, it was planned by people wanting to keep power. There was a long government-led hat campaign against the Tutsis.
Jonathan Glover
#11. Fundamentalist Christianity appeals to pre-civilized, prudish tribal people who are not ready for urban feudal pleasures.
Timothy Leary
#12. It's important to get a translator who will ask the questions in a sensitive and thoughtful way. Knowing the ethnicity issues, the tribal issues in some places ... who your translator is can mean a lot.
Peter Menzel
#13. Unlike some mainland black groups, Tasmanian Aborigines now have no traditional tribal culture left. It was taken from them with great violence and great rapidity.
Richard Flanagan
#14. When two strangers in a tribal society want to trade, they will often establish trust by appealing to a common god, mythical ancestor or totem animal.
Yuval Noah Harari
#15. Hands were such extraordinary tools, she mused. Tools, weapons, clumsy and deft, numb and tactile. Among tribal hunters, they could speak, a flurry of gestures eloquent in silence. But they could not taste. Could not hear. Could not weep. For all that, they killed so easily.
Steven Erikson
#16. It should simply be an empirical matter whether the climate is changing or not and whether we're responsible. But the various sides of the debate have now become so tribal that it's no longer a matter of changing our views as more information comes in.
Ian McEwan
#17. The tribal leaders saw that we were bad-asses, and they'd better get their act together, work together, and stop accommodating the insurgents. Force moved that battle. We killed the bad guys and brought the leaders to the peace table. That is how the world works.
Chris Kyle
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Many tribal peoples consider illness to be one of the most reliable sources of revelation. Many of the practices that traditional religions impose upon seekers-abstinence, isolation, stillness-are practices that illness imposes upon us, so it is in a sense a cocoon that allows revelation to unfold.
Kat Duff
#21. I think that, in almost all human beings, there is buried a profound tribal instinct that makes us very susceptible to being aroused to patriotic fervour.
Adam Hochschild
#22. To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
John Updike
#23. You say 'African music' and you think 'tribal drumming.' But there's a lot of African music that's like James Brown, and a lot, too, that sounds very Hispanic.
Damian Marley
#24. This rising global humanism is, in fact, the rising into consciousness of a tribal god similar to the kind of tribal god that functioned in these pre-Hellenic societies.
Terence McKenna
#25. No. But then the American Government
whatever branch
has never really grasped the concept of tribal identity.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#26. [ ... ] when you look at the world, you put on the goggles of custom, habit and tribal wisdom lest the truth make you insane [ ... ] you see the world reflected in your own image; you see yourself reflected to the image of the world [ ... ]
David Zindell
#27. Tribal Chief 1: The will of the people is what is best. That is what democracy means
Tribal Chief 2: But if the people don't know what they are talking about, how can that be the best?
Leonard Wibberley
#28. The crossing of space ... may do much to turn men's minds outwards and away from their present tribal squabbles. In this sense, the rocket, far from being one of the destroyers of civilisation, may provide the safety-value that is needed to preserve it.
Arthur C. Clarke
#29. My own special knowledge is about the Abenaki people and, to some degree, my Iroquois neighbors. But whenever I write anything about another tribal nation, I always get a lot of help. Not just from books, but from people who belong to that tribal nation.
Joseph Bruchac
#30. I think the fact that us as a race still continues to be very tribal and we haven't really moved away from that over hundreds and hundreds of years of experience ...
Michael Fassbender
#31. the Kauravas and the Pandavas turned from demi-gods into cave men, the great war reduced to a tribal feud fought with sticks and stones.
William Dalrymple
#32. Where you can see tribal behavior now is in this business about teaching evolution in a science class and intelligent design. It's the scientists themselves are behaving tribally.
Kurt Vonnegut
#33. It's much better to be a tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find one peanut of truth in our own individual mind. Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.
Natalie Goldberg
#34. There's no question that the main location of Al Qaida is in tribal areas of Pakistan.
Leon Panetta
#35. I'm a huge NBA fan and watch many games each year. Following any sport is kind of bringing us back to our tribal roots.
John Mackey
#36. I'm not tribal Labour. I'm a Liberal at heart. Different tradition, different language.
Michael Ignatieff
#37. People are hard-wired for tribal identity.
Bruce Pavitt
#38. He was nearly blind in his left eye, and said left eyes were the tribal curse of the Finches. Whenever he wanted to see something well, he turned his head and looked from his right eye.
Harper Lee
#39. Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased.
Alice Dreger
#41. Instead, the lesson is that false beliefs, once they've become culturally entrenched - once they've become tribal badges of honor - are very difficult to change, and changing them is no longer simply a matter of educating people.
Joshua D. Greene
#42. Many of the tribal reservations today remain mired in poverty and alcoholism because many native [sic] Americans continue to cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition instead of coming into the light of Christianity and assimilating into Christian culture.
Bryan Fischer
#43. I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.
William S. Burroughs
#44. The chief source of man's inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#45. We found a great rhythm. Contractions started kicking in. I sat there with her, right between her legs. We got tribal on it, we danced to it! I was DJ-ing this Brazilian music.
Matthew McConaughey
#46. A two thousand years old culture is being replaced by Arab Bedouin culture in the name of Islam. Cheegha, The Call is a lone voice against the threat to the tribal way of life, the ways of the fathers.
Ghulam Qadir Khan Daur
#47. It's not enough to say it's shocking, it's appalling, and to condemn only individual acts. We need to challenge and bring down the tribal honor-and-shame culture as codified in the Islamic religion.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#48. Some of the world's violent conflicts are mainly economic, territorial or tribal. But many seem to come, at least in part, from conflicts between the belief systems of different groups.
Jonathan Glover
#49. So, at one extreme you have indigenous, tribal societies trying to stem the race to disaster. At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full-speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible.
Noam Chomsky
#51. My art collection is dominated by tribal art from Nigeria where I taught school, from New Guinea where we've travelled, and by Canadian Haida pieces. My own art is either on exhibition or owned by other people!
Robert Bateman
#52. If you go back in time you'll find tribes that were essentially only concerned with their own tribal members. If you were a member of another tribe, you could be killed with impunity.
Peter Singer
#53. To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous and destructive. Religious beliefs give a spurious spiritual dimension to tribal enmities.
Peter Medawar
#54. Hadn't one of my all-time favorite reveries been to become a cranky hermit, live unperturbed in my house, and have things brought to me like a monarch or tribal lord?
Laurie Notaro
#55. Irish politics are tribal, incestuous, tangled and furtive, incomprehensible even to many of the people involved.
Tana French
#56. Also, I think that, you know, it's tribal behavior. I don't think that Pat Robertson, for instance, doubts that we evolved. He is simply representing a tribe.
Kurt Vonnegut
#57. Balkanization.. had come to denote the parcelization of large & viable political units but also had become a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian.
Maria N. Todorova
#58. The tribal attitude said, and continues to say, that Gay people are especially empowered because we are able to identify with both sexes and can see into more than one world at once, having the capacity to see from more than one point of view at a time. And that is also an Indian way of seeing.
Judy Grahn
#59. For crying out loud, Baker, what rock have you been living under? Oh, yeah, you're from Kansas. He said it as if Kansas were in some remote tribal region inhabited by illiterate natives like the ones in my National Geographic magazines.
Clare Vanderpool
#60. For magicians -- whether modern entertainers or indigenous, tribal sorcerers -- have in common the fact that they work with the malleable texture of perception.
David Abram
#61. With Barack Obama as president and the super-happening Michelle Obama as First Lady, you would think a new tone, a new tune, a kicky new jazzitude, would have entered Washington discourse, but it remains a landlocked island unto itself, held captive by its tribal fevers.
James Wolcott
#62. My first meeting as a senator, my first day, they were already talking about the next election. Part of that's the permanent campaign, part of that's a word I've been using more frequently, 'tribal.' Our politics has become tribal: It's us versus them.
Evan Bayh
#63. I felt it [Shakespeare's Coriolanus] is sort of an examination of our dysfunction as a nationalistic, tribal entities. I think the world is rocking and cracking open in weird and worrying places. And I think Coriolanus, the play, reflected that.
Ralph Fiennes
#64. We don't know whether they're going to eat us or elect us for their tribal deities.
Clark Ashton Smith
#66. The beauty of a Moroccan riad is undeniable, but even the most die-hard fan may find herself growing a little weary of what can come to feel like a one-size-fits-all aesthetic: tilework, white Berber rugs, woolen tribal throw pillows in reds and ochers, cut-metal lanterns.
Hanya Yanagihara
#67. Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors.
Sam Harris
#68. Say it's true: It is what it is. We're social, tribal, musical animals, walking percussion instruments. Most of us do the best we can. We show up. We strive for gratitude, and try not to be such babies.
Anne Lamott
#69. Definitely, a non-tribal can become chief minister in Jharkhand.
Kariya Munda
#70. I think my masks reference artists who reference primitivism. They're not directly connected to tribal arts. I think they look more like third-grade art projects.
Mark Grotjahn
#71. PATRIOTIC AND TRIBAL feelings belong to the squalling childhood of the human race, and become no more charming in their senescence.
Christopher Hitchens
#72. Give these Indians little farms, survey them, let them put fences around them, let them have their own horses, cows, sheep, things that they can call their own, and it will do away with tribal Indians.
George Crook
#73. The best way to live in this real world is to free ourselves of demons and tribal gods.
Edward O. Wilson
#74. The emotive power of hummus all over the Middle East cannot be overstated, being the focus of some serious tribal rivalries.
Yotam Ottolenghi
#75. Politics' the polite word for antediluvian prejudices, the rags put on by enmity and tribal resentment.
Joseph O'Connor
#76. I suppose that the media and their portrayal of Islam and the almost tribal separations and divisions of the Muslims are the greatest issues confronting Muslims in the United Kingdom.
Cat Stevens
#77. We are reluctant to live outside tribal rules because we are afraid of getting kicked out of the tribe.
Caroline Myss
#78. We are not afraid of predators, we're transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and fables and chatter endlessly about them, because fascination creates preparedness, and preparedness, survival. In a deeply tribal way, we love our monsters ...
E. O. Wilson
#79. I live within the vivid colors of my imagination, soaring with rainbow-feathered birds, racing the desert winds on horseback, wrapped in ancient tribal jewels, dancing with mythical tigers in steamy jungles.
Laurel Burch
#80. These are the decisions that I and many other tribal judges try to make. Solid decisions with no scattershot opinions attached. Everything we do, no matter how trivial, must be crafted keenly. We are trying to build a solid base here for our sovereignty.
Louise Erdrich
#81. Only two to three per cent of an audience is interested in words and pays attention to lyrics; most of the rest of it is about image or the beat or the sound, or else it's a tribal thing - country & western, rap, heavy metal, with historical folk rock off in some kind of cult.
Al Stewart
#82. In Tanzania, it was more than one hundred tribal units which lost their freedom; it was one nation that regained it.
Julius Nyerere
#83. Every year, I travel extensively in the autumn and the spring. I set most of the winter and summer aside for my family and my own tribal relatives. But during that traveling time, I often find myself visiting other native communities around the continent - perhaps a dozen or more each year.
Joseph Bruchac
#84. It's wrong to try and convert tribal societies. What should the empirical evidence for religion be? It should produce peaceful, strong, secure people who are right with God and right with the world. I don't see that evidence very often.
Daniel Everett
#85. Naanabozho was the first tribal trickster on the earth.
Gerald Vizenor
#86. One-on-one revenge was common in foraging societies, and kin-against-kin blood feuds were common in tribal societies that had not been pacified by a colonial or national government, particularly if they had an exaggerated culture of manly honor.
Steven Pinker
#87. Like being a woman, like being a racial religious tribal or ethnic minority, being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights.
Hillary Clinton
#88. Capitalism has been called a system of greed - yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of.
Ayn Rand
#89. I was a big fan of Middle Eastern elements of music and experimental electronic and tribal sounds.
Adam Lambert
#90. Tribal sovereignty means that. It's sovereign. You're a ... you're a ... you've been given sovereignty and you're viewed as a sovereign entity.
George W. Bush
#91. I've always been interested in the way males seem to need to start clubs, or cults, to keep girls out until they need them for sex. It comes from some weird immature tribal crap, I'm sure.
Gilberto Hernandez Guerrero
#92. It always bothers me when I hear Rwanda's genocide described as a product of "ancient tribal hatreds." I think this is an easy way for Westerners to dismiss the whole thing as a regrettable but pointless bloodbath that happens to primitive brown people.
Paul Rusesabagina
#93. For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
Marshall McLuhan
#94. The richness of our ethnic insults vocabulary was wide and deep. It reflected, all too easily, the more elaborate predjiduces of our parents (not my parents), which in their rabid form, had already resulted in tribal bloodbaths.
Andrei Codrescu
#96. Absolutely, it's a Sunni area. So the key here, once Ramadi is taken that you have the Sunni tribal fighters, Sunni police in there patrolling the city.
Tom Bowman
#97. When you're around the whole Dead scene, they're there as a tribal thing; they're there as part of a rendezvous and a pow-wow.
Ken Kesey
#98. I was raised in a tribal situation, among cannibal people.
William P. Young
#99. Just as there are many Jews who keep the Friday ritual in their home despite describing themselves as atheists, I am a 'tribal Christian,' happy to attend church services.
Martin Rees
#100. That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.
Ben Kingsley
