Chief Seattle Quotes
120 Chief Seattle Quotes
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All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.
Chief Seattle
There is no death, only a change of worlds.
Chief Seattle
Continue to contaminate your own bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.
Chief Seattle
Our dead never forget the beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its winding rivers, its great mountains, and its sequestered vales, and they ever yearn in tender affection over the lonely-hearted living and often return to visit and comfort them.
Chief Seattle
Regret is useless.
Chief Seattle
Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth.
Chief Seattle
This we know: The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know.
Chief Seattle
Perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand.
Chief Seattle
Man did not weave the web of life: he is merely a strand in it.
Chief Seattle
Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
Chief Seattle
My words are like stars that never set. What Seattle says, the great chief…can rely upon, with as much certainty as…the return of the seasons.
Chief Seattle
The son of the white chief says his father sends us greetings of friendship and goodwill. This is kind, for we know he has little need of our friendship in return, because his people are many. They are like the grass that covers the vast prairies, while my people are few, and resemble the scattering tress of a storm-swept plain.
Chief Seattle
The great, and I presume also good, white chief sends us word that he wants to buy our land but is willing to allow us to receive enough to live on comfortably. This indeed appears generous, for the red man no longer has rights that he need respect, and the offer may be wise, also, for we are no longer in need of a great country.
Chief Seattle
There was a time when our people covered the whole land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea covers its shell-paved floor. But that time has long since passed away with the greatness of tribes now almost forgotten.
Chief Seattle
I will not mourn over our untimely decay, nor reproach my paleface brothers for hastening it, for we, too, may have been somewhat to blame.
Chief Seattle
When our young men grow angry at some real or imaginary wrong, and disfigure their faces with black paint, their hearts, also, are disfigured and turn black, and then their cruelty is relentless and knows no bounds, and our old men are not able to restrain them.
Chief Seattle
But let us hope that hostilities between the red man and his paleface brothers may never return. We would have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
Chief Seattle
Revenge with our young braves, is considered gain, even at the cost of their own lives, but old men who stay at home in times of war, and old women, who have sons to lose, know better.
Chief Seattle
We are two distinct races and must ever remain so. There is little in common between us….Your religion was written on tablets of stone by the iron finger of an angry God, lest you might forget it. The red man could never remember nor comprehend it. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors, the dreams of our old men, given them by the Great Spirit, and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people.
Chief Seattle
Our great and good Father [President George Washington] sends us word that if we do as he desires he will buy our lands….allow us to live comfortably…protect us with his brave warriors; his wonderful ships of war will fill our harbours. Then our ancient northern enemies will cease to frighten.
Chief Seattle
So we will consider your offer to buy our land. If we decide to accept, I will make one condition: The white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers.
Chief Seattle
I am a savage and I do not understand any other way.
Chief Seattle
I've seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train.
Chief Seattle
I am a savage and I do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be more important than the buffalo that we kill only to stay alive.
Chief Seattle
What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit.
Chief Seattle
For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected.
Chief Seattle
Your God loves your people and hates mine. He folds his strong arms lovingly around the white man and leads him as a father leads his infant son, but he has forsaken his red children. He makes your people wax strong every day, and soon they will fill the land; while my people are ebbing away like a fast – receding tide that will never flow again.
Chief Seattle
Day and night cannot dwell together. The red man has ever fled the approach of the white man as the changing mists on the mountainside flee before the blazing morning sun.
Chief Seattle
It matters little where we pass the remnant of our days. They will not be many. The Indian’s night promises to be dark…a few more moments…a few more winters.
Chief Seattle
When the last red man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white man, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the ship, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be along….At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone.
Chief Seattle
So, when the Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy land, he asks much of us. The Great Chief sends word he will reserve us a place so that we can live comfortably to ourselves.
Chief Seattle
He will be our father and we will be his children. So we will consider your offer to buy our land.
Chief Seattle
But it will not be easy. For this land is sacred to us.
Chief Seattle
This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors.
Chief Seattle
If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people.
Chief Seattle
The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father.
Chief Seattle
We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land what he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy – and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his fathers’ graves, and his childrens’ birthright is forgotten.
Chief Seattle
What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.
Chief Seattle
The very dust under your feet responds more lovingly to our footsteps than to yours, because it is the ashes of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch, for the soil is rich with the life of our kindred.
Chief Seattle
Yonder sky that has wept tears of passion.
Chief Seattle
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