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

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.

God made me an Indian.

I have killed, robbed, and injured too many white men to believe in a good peace. They are medicine, and I would eventually die a lingering death. I had rather die on the field of battle.

The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.

Each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its humors, is also such a garden or such a pond.

A tool is usually more simple than a machine; it is generally used with the hand, whilst a machine is frequently moved by animal or steam power.

Person who chases two rabbits catches neither.

And here I am, dying in my bed, like cattle die. May the eyes of cowards never sleep.

You can put wings on a pig, but you don’t make it an eagle.

A man that is not afraid of a Lion is afraid of a Cat .

It’s humbling to think that all animals, including human beings, are parasites of the plant world.

The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten.