Chief Seattle Quotes
120 Chief Seattle Quotes
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This earth is precious to him, and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its Creator.
Chief Seattle
The whites too shall pass; perhaps sooner than all other tribes. Contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.
Chief Seattle
But in your perishing you will shine brightly, fired by the strength of God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man.
Chief Seattle
That destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires.
Chief Seattle
Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone. The end of living and the beginning of survival.
Chief Seattle
The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.
Chief Seattle
We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs.
Chief Seattle
The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on.
Chief Seattle
He leaves his father's graves behind, and he does not care.
Chief Seattle
He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care.
Chief Seattle
His father's grave, and his children's birthright, are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads.
Chief Seattle
His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert.
Chief Seattle
I do not know. Our ways are different from your ways.
Chief Seattle
Today it is fair. Tomorrow it may be covered with cloud.
Chief Seattle
My words are like the stars. They do not set.
Chief Seattle
What Seattle says, the great chief Washington can count on as surely as our white brothers can count on the return of the seasons.
Chief Seattle
His people are many, like the grass that covers the plains. My people are few, like the trees scattered by the storms on the grasslands.
Chief Seattle
Once my people covered this land like a flood-tide moving with the wind across the shell-littered flats.
Chief Seattle
To us the ashes of our fathers are sacred. Their graves are holy ground. But you are wanderers, you leave your fathers' graves behind you, and you do not care.
Chief Seattle
Day and night cannot live together.
Chief Seattle
Fate hunts the red man down.
Chief Seattle
Tribes are made of men, nothing more. Men come and go, like the waves of the sea.
Chief Seattle
A tear, a prayer to the Great Spirit, a dirge, and they are gone from our longing eyes forever.
Chief Seattle
Even the white man, whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny.
Chief Seattle
We will consider your offer. When we have decided, we will let you know. Should we accept, I here and now make this condition: we will never be denied the right to visit, at any time, the graves of our fathers and our friends.
Chief Seattle
Every part of this earth is sacred to my people.
Chief Seattle
Our bare feet know the kindred touch.
Chief Seattle
The earth is rich with the lives of our kin.
Chief Seattle
When the last red man has vanished from this earth, and his memory is only a story among the whites, these shores will still swarm with the invisible dead of my people.
Chief Seattle
And when you children's children think they are alone in the fields, the forests, the shops, the highways, or the quiet of the woods, they will not be alone.
Chief Seattle
There is no place in this country where a man can be alone.
Chief Seattle
At night when the streets of your towns and cities are quiet, and you think they are empty, they will throng with the returning spirits that once thronged them, and that still love these places. The white man will never be alone.
Chief Seattle
The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the red man. But perhaps it is because the red man is a savage and does not understand.
Chief Seattle
There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect's wings.
Chief Seattle
The clatter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if a man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs around a pond at night? I am a red man and do not understand.
Chief Seattle
The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of a pond, and the smell of the wind itself, cleaned by a midday rain, or scented with the pinion pine.
Chief Seattle
Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.
Chief Seattle
All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.
Chief Seattle
Our dead never forget this beautiful earth. It is their mother.
Chief Seattle
The dead have power too.
Chief Seattle
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