The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.

When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.

Give a small number of people the power to enrich themselves beyond everyone's wildest dreams, a philosophical rationale to explain all the damage they're causing, and they will not stop until they've run the world economy off a cliff.

If no one heard your sounds then you did not really make them.

You have to believe in yourself and only trust your own vision and instincts. If Id listened to what other people thought about my work in the first 10 years that I was a writer, I never would have made it to begin with.

You ought to be able to grow up in a place and not have to get the hell out of it when you turn eighteen.

No land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth.