“They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.”

What white man has ever seen me drunk? Who has ever come to me hungry and left me unfed? Who has seen me beat my wives or abuse my children? What law have I broken?

Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Sioux? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country?

Our religion seems foolish to you, but so does yours to me. The Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians and the Catholics all have a different God. Why cannot we have one of our own?

He put in your heart certain wishes and plans; in my heart he put other different desires.

The life my people want is a life of freedom. I have seen nothing that a white man has, houses or railways or clothing or food, that is as good as the right to move in the open country and live in our fashion.

You come here to tell us lies, but we don’t want to hear them. If we told you more, you would have paid no attention. That is all I have to say.

What does it matter how long I pray, so long as my prayers are answered?

This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path.

It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land.

If we must die, we die defending our rights.

What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken? Not one.

They want us to give up another chunk of our tribal land. This is not the first time or the last time.

God made me an Indian, but not a reservation Indian.

Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit. It is not necessary for eagles to be crows. Now we are poor but we are free. No white man controls our footsteps. If we must die, we die defending our rights.

If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans, and in my heart he put other and different desires. It is not necessary for eagles to be crows.

A cold wind blew on the prairie on the day the last buffalo fell. A death wind for my people.

Many of us don’t realize that we have a choice about which aspect of ourselves we will use as the foundation upon which we build our lives.

The strain of life is what builds our strength. If there is no strain, there will be no strength.

The actual sight of a first-class house that a Negro has built is ten times more potent than pages of discussion about a house that he ought to build, or perhaps could build.

Integrity is built by defeating the temptation to be dishonest; humility grows when we refuse to be prideful; and endurance develops every time you reject the temptation to give up.

Faded secrets and old voices have built towns inside my heart. Thats were we still meet.

Unfortunately, unless we’re focused on building up our courage, which gives us our self-confidence and all that we need to make quantum change in our lives, the voice of fear will always take the lead inside our minds.

You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.

The perfection preached in the gospels never yet built an empire. Every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness, and cunning.