Quotes from Chief Seattle

When the green hills are covered with talking wires and the wolves no longer sing, what good will the money you paid for our land be then

Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints!

What is there to life if a man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs around the pool at night?

Your God is not our God! Your God loves your people and hates mine! He folds his strong protecting arms lovingly about the paleface and leads him by the hand as a father leads an infant son.

How can your God become our God and renew our prosperity and awaken in us dreams of returning greatness?

Our God, the Great Spirit, seems also to have forsaken us. Your God makes your people wax stronger every day. Soon they will fill all the land.

Revenge by young men is considered gain, even at the cost of their own lives, but old men who stay at home in times of war, and mothers who have sons to lose, know better.

If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless.

To us, the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground.

Your religion was written on tablets of stone, ours on our hearts. 8. We are part of the earth and the earth is part of us.

When the Earth is sick, the animals will begin to disappear, when that happens, The Warriors of the Rainbow will come to save them.

Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth, befalls the children of the Earth.

All things are connected like the blood which unites one family.

Whatever Seattle says, the great chief at Washington can rely upon with as much certainty as he can upon the return of the sun or the seasons.

Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return. The white man's God cannot love our people, or He would protect them.

Day and night cannot dwell together. The Red Man has ever fled the approach of the White Man, as the morning mist flees before the morning sun.

When the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among the white men shall have become a myth, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless.

All creation is one. What we do to one, we do to the entire web of life.

To harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

Humans merely share the earth. We can only protect the land, not own it.

There is no death, only a change of worlds.

All things are bound together. All things connect.