The bottom line about the information possessed by non-Western peoples is that the information becomes valid only when offered by a white scholar recognized by the academic establishment; in effect, the color of the skin guarantees scientific objectivity.

— Vine Deloria Jr.

Vine Deloria Jr. Quotes

Religion is for people who’re afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who’ve already been there.

— Vine Deloria Jr.

Every society needs educated people, but the primary responsibility of educated people is to bring wisdom back into the community and make it available to others so that the lives they are leading make sense.

— Vine Deloria Jr.

Custer is said to have boasted that he could ride through the entire Sioux Nation with his Seventh Cavalry, and he was half right. He got half-way through.

— Vine Deloria Jr.

Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent.

— Vine Deloria Jr.

Like almost everyone else in America, I grew up believing the myth of the objective scientist. Fortunately I was raised on the edges of two very distinct cultures, western European and American Indian...

— Vine Deloria Jr.

The future of mankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things.

— Vine Deloria Jr.

Not only did secular scientists rout the Christian fundamentalists, they placed themselves in the posture of knowing more, on the basis of their own very short-term investigations, than the collective remembrances of the rest of humankind.

— Vine Deloria Jr.

To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical.

— Vine Deloria Jr.

The bottom line about the information possessed by non-Western peoples is that the information becomes valid only when offered by a white scholar recognized by the academic establishment; in effect, the color of the skin guarantees scientific objectivity.

— Vine Deloria Jr.

This country was a lot better off when the Indians were running it.

— Vine Deloria Jr.

Do certain sets of circumstances lie ahead of us wherein we change the world radically by the choices we make?

— Vine Deloria Jr.

If you want to be sovereign, act sovereign.

— Vine Deloria Jr.

With the collision of the Shoemaker comet into Jupiter, the era of uniformitarian orthodoxy must come to an end. Minds that have been closed for nearly half a millennium can now be opened to see what really has happened to our planet in the past – and that past is not as distant as we might suppose.

— Vine Deloria Jr.

But even labeling a site as astronomical is an improvement, since it partially sidesteps the old stereotype of Indians being primitive and ignorant savages.

— Vine Deloria Jr.

Royalty has always been an unconscious but all-consuming goal of the European immigrant.

— Vine Deloria Jr.
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