Vine Deloria Quotes

#1. 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.

#2. Looking at the individuals who suffered the most during the hurricane, you could see that those with underlying medical problems were at greater risk.

Richard E. Besser

#3. If you want to be sovereign, act sovereign.

Vine Deloria Jr.

#4. Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent.

Vine Deloria Jr.

#5. Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who've already been there.

Vine Deloria Jr.

#6. Culture, as Indian people understood it, was basically a lifestyle by which a people acted. It was self-expression, but not a conscious self-expression. Rather, it was an expression of the essence of a
people.

Vine Deloria Jr.

#7. Do certain sets of circumstances lie ahead of us wherein we change the world radically by the choices we make?

Vine Deloria Jr.

#8. Every society needs educated people, but the primary responsibility of educated people is to bring wisdom back into the community and make it available to others so that the lives they are leading make sense.

Vine Deloria Jr.

#9. 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.

#10. I don't want anything from you, Edward. If you'd only told me you were still in love with Emma - '

'You don't understand,' he interrupts. 'It was like an illness. I hated myself every second I was with her.

J.P. Delaney

#11. An old chief of the Crow tribe from Montana was once asked to describe the difference between his tribe and the whites who lived nearby. Pausing slightly and drawing his conclusions, he remarked that the white man has ideas, the Indian has visions. The

Vine Deloria Jr.

#12. Custer is said to have boasted that he could ride through the entire Sioux Nation with his Seventh Cavalry, and he was half right. He got half-way through.

Vine Deloria Jr.

#13. The future of mankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things.

Vine Deloria Jr.

#14. This country was a lot better off when the Indians were running it.

Vine Deloria Jr.

#15. But even labeling a site as astronomical is an improvement, since it partially sidesteps the old stereotype of Indians being primitive and ignorant savages.

Vine Deloria Jr.

#16. My children have grown up around animals. They're not scared of them.

Candace Cameron

#17. Not only did secular scientists rout the Christian fundamentalists, they placed themselves in the posture of knowing more, on the basis of their own very short-term investigations, than the collective remembrances of the rest of humankind.

Vine Deloria Jr.

#18. The bottom line about the information possessed by non-Western peoples is that the information becomes valid only when offered by a white scholar recognized by the academic establishment; in effect, the color of the skin guarantees scientific objectivity.

Vine Deloria Jr.

#19. Royalty has always been an unconscious but all-consuming goal of the European immigrant.

Vine Deloria Jr.

#20. You have a one of a kind gift to offer this world, and you are unique in the entire history of creation.

Wayne Dyer

#21. For some unknown reason, this [antiabortion] branch of Christianity cherishes the unborn and hates the living person.

Vine Deloria Jr.

#22. Godwin's law states that the longer any online debate goes on, the likelier it is that someone will play the Nazi card. It's the rhetorical equivalent of going nuclear and stupid at the same time.

John Avlon

#23. When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply Ours.

Vine Deloria Jr.

#24. To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical.

Vine Deloria Jr.

#25. These Indians are fierce, they wear feathers and grunt. Most of us dont fit this idealized figure since we grunt only when overeating

Vine Deloria Jr.