It is the mothers not the warriors who create a people and guide their destiny.

For the Lakota there was no wilderness. Nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly.

The man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures and acknowledging unity with the universe of things, was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization.

It is the mothers not the warriors who create a people and guide their destiny.

"Civilization" has been thrust upon me since the days of the reservations, and it has not added one whit to my sense of justice, to my reverence for the rights of life, to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity, or to my faith in Wakan Tanka, God of the Lakotas.

White men seem to have difficulty in realizing that people who live differently from themselves still might be traveling the upward and progressive road of life.

The old Lakota was wise. He knew that a man's heart away from nature becomes hard.