Sitting Bull Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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.

Sitting Bull
Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possessions is a disease in them.

Sitting Bull
Therefore, I do not wish to consider any proposition to cede any portion of our tribal holdings to the Great Father.

Sitting Bull
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?

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

Sitting Bull
If a man loses anything and goes back and looks carefully for it, he will find it.

Sitting Bull
The life of white men is slavery. They are prisoners in towns or farms.

Sitting Bull
I surrender this rifle to you through my young son, whom I now desire to teach in this manner that he has become a friend of the Americans. I wish him to learn the habits of the whites and to be educated as their sons are educated. I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle. This boy has given it to you, and he now wants to know how he is going to make a living.

Sitting Bull
Go back home where you came from. This country is mine, and I intend to stay here and to raise this country full of grown people.

Sitting Bull
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.

Sitting Bull
I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle.

Sitting Bull
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?

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

Sitting Bull
I hardly sustain myself beneath the weight of white men's blood that I have shed. The whites provoked the war; their injustices, their indignities to our families, the cruel, unheard of and wholly unprovoked massacre at Fort Lyon … shook all the veins which bind and support me. I rose, tomahawk in hand, and I have done all the hurt to the whites that I could.

Sitting Bull
I am here by the will of the Great Spirit, and by his will I am chief.… I want to tell you that if the Great Spirit has chosen anyone to be the chief of this country, it is myself.

Sitting Bull
Look at me, see if I am poor, or my people either. The whites may get me at last, as you say, but I will have good times till then. You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hard-tack, and a little sugar and coffee.

Sitting Bull
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.

Sitting Bull
The Black Hills belong to me. If the whites try to take them, I will fight.

Sitting Bull
Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that from us also.

Sitting Bull
I do not wish to be shut up in a corral. All agency Indians I have seen are worthless. They are neither red warriors nor white farmers. They are neither wolf nor dog.

Sitting Bull
Where the last stand was made, the Long Hair stood like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him.

Sitting Bull
If I agree to dispose of any part of our land to the white people I would feel guilty of taking food away from our children's mouths, and I do not wish to be that mean.

Sitting Bull