Chief Seattle Quotes

My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain...There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.

~ Chief Seattle

Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints!

~ Chief Seattle

The white man will never be alone. Let him be just, and deal kindly with my people. For the dead are not powerless.

~ Chief Seattle

Like a man who has been dying for many days, a man in your city is numb to the stench.

~ Chief Seattle

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.

~ Chief Seattle

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.

~ Chief Seattle

Youth is impulsive. When our young men grow angry at some real or imaginary wrong, and disfigure their faces with black paint, it denotes that their hearts are black, and that they are often cruel and relentless, and our old men and old women are unable to restrain them. Thus it has ever been.

~ Chief Seattle

What is man without the beasts? For if all the beast were gone, man would die of a great loneliness of the spirit.

~ Chief Seattle

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.

~ Chief Seattle