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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.

All things share the same breath - the beast, the tree, the man... the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.

Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors - the dreams of our old men, given them in solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people.

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

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

There is no death, only a change of worlds.