John Trudell Quotes

Historically speaking, we went from being Indians to pagans to savages to hostiles to militants to activists to Native Americans. Its five hundred years later and they still cant see us. We are still invisible.

We have power... Our power isn’t in a political system, or a religious system, or in an economic system, or in a military system; these are authoritarian systems... they have power... but it’s not reality. The power of our intelligence, individually or collectively IS the power; this is the power that any industrial ruling class truly fears: clear coherent human beings.

Every human being is a raindrop. And when enough of the raindrops become clear and coherent they then become the power of the storm.

I'm just a human being trying to make it in a world that is very rapidly losing it's understanding of being human.

We’re not Indians and we’re not Native Americans. We’re older than both concepts. We’re the people, we’re the human beings.

Protect your spirit, because you are in the place where spirits get eaten.

We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all of the natural world has a right to existence and we are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off.

The great lie is that it is civilization. It's not civilized. It has been literally the most blood thirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That's the great lie, is that it represents civilization.

When we're believing, we're not really thinking, because the belief has walls: "This is what I believe." So what I believe is like a box, and we're taking the energy of our thinking and putting into a box of beliefs, pretending that we're thinking. But we're really stifling our own energy. We create these mental stresses and frustrations, because we're blocking our spirit, so to speak.

Don't trust anyone who isn't angry.

When I go around in America and I see the bulk of the white people, they do not feel oppressed; they feel powerless... and we understand the psychological genocide that they have already inflicted upon their own people.

I think it's the responsibility of every human being, not just those who wear the identity of poet, activist, voter, religious person... it's the responsibility of every person. Our responsibility is to use our intelligence as clearly and coherently as we possibly can.

Everything that has ever happened to us is there to make us stronger.

Our bones, flesh and blood are made up of the metals, liquids and minerals of the earth and everything on this planet is made up of the same things. As humans we have being, so everything on the earth does too in our culture, because we are made of the same thing.

I think we live in an industrial dimensional reality where we're programmed to believe what we're told. We're programmed to believe them. We're programmed to believe what that ruling class wants us to believe.

Believing isn't thinking, but we've been programmed to believe that believing is thinking. To use our intelligence to think means we're keeping the energy active, we're thinking, we're really using the power of our intelligence in a thinking way. But when we've been programmed to believe, we're no longer thinking, because energy flows.

We're all human beings and we all have feelings. And we all live in this industrial meat grinder where we don't really understand love anymore.

It’s like there is this predator energy on this planet, and this predator energy feeds on the essence of the spirit.

The thing is, it has to do with heart - we have to understand what hearts are for before we can get back to heaven or paradise or the power in our minds.

I've gone through most of my life not believing anything. Either I know or I don't know, or I think.

Sometimes when it rains, it's not that simple, when the sky has reasons to cry.

The past is more than a memory.

Because you look at it, you know, and there's basically one set of rules that protect that industrial ruling class. That's what the governments do, that's what the religions do. They protect the interests of that industrial ruling class.

As human beings we're living in a reality of industrial madness.

I think that if the political and social movement groups and organizations that operate in this country today had the same kind of energetic commitment that the medical marijuana people have, many things could change in this country.