Chief Seattle Quotes

The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

The Earth does not belong to us: we belong to the Earth.

I think it's really important that we understand that we share this world and we're connected to it.

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.

The earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.

Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.

Humans merely share the earth. We can only protect the land, not own it.

We are evolutionary descendents of this marvellous panoply of life. And what that says unequivocally is we have an utter total obligation to make sure we have an environment that not only is good for us but is good for all living organisms.

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

Your connections with other people are important, our connection to the earth.

Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

Maybe it's because I look into the future professionally, but I see great possibilities for both humanity and our planet. I don't believe the thriving of one has to come at the expense of the other, and I'm deeply concerned to find out whether other people do think that.

It is not oil or the environment, it is oil and the environment. We are living in the same world. We are not enemies.

We talk of our mastery of nature, which sounds very grand; but the fact is we respectfully adapt ourselves, first, to her ways.

Living on a planet of fixed size requires compromise, and while we are the only party capable of negotiating, we are not the only party at the table. We've never claimed more, and we've never had less.

My definition is that geo-enlightenment is understanding the interconnectedness of things.

What I have experienced over time is that environmental problems are easier to deal with in ways that don't go into their interconnections to the rest of what we are.

Unless we connect directly with the earth, we will not have the faintest clue why we should save it…. Only if we understand the beauty of nature will we love it, and only if we become alerted to learn about the planet's disease processes can we decide to live our lives with a proper sense of ecological responsibility.

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts... The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

The way a human can coexist with nature has to be at the spiritual level.

I'm a child of the Earth, postcode unknown.

We can at least see that the question is asked, and asked on the basis of a clear recognition that there is no way of manipulating our environment that is without cost or consequence - and thus also of a recognition that we are inextricably bound up with the destiny of our world. There is no guarantee that the world we live in will "tolerate" us indefinitely if we prove ourselves unable to live within its constraints.

If we had adhered to the concept of connectedness, then we would not have created nuclear weapons, huge armies and global warming.

We should be evolving into a new age of business with a worldview that maintains one simple proposition - that all of nature: humans, animals, earth, are interconnected and interdependent.