Leonard Peltier Quotes

It is because I recognize the brutality with which my own multi-branched ancestors have been treated that I can identify the despicable, lawless, cruel, and sadistic behavior that has characterized Israel's attempts to erase a people, the Palestinians, from their own land.

The United States was founded on the triple sin of slavery, genocide, and land theft.

Weak minds exaggerate too much the wrong done to the Africans.

But 18 years after the passage of the Civil Liberties Act, there still remains unfinished work to completely rectify and close this regrettable chapter in our Nation's history.

There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history. It is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations.

We study the injustices of history for the same reason that we study genocide, and for the same reason that psychologists study the minds of murderers and rapists... to understand how those evil things came about.

Although lynchings have steadily increased in number and barbarity during the last twenty years, there has been no single effort put forth by the many moral and philanthropic forces of the country to put a stop to this wholesale slaughter.

The lives of African-Americans in this country are characterized by violence for most of our history. Much of that violence, at least to some extent, you know, done by the very state that's supposed to protect them.

Here's the reality. The image of a white Jesus has been used to justify enslavement, conquest, colonialism, the genocide of indigenous peoples. There are literally millions of human beings whose lives have been snuffed out by people who conquered under the banner of a white god.

These barbarities [American lynchings] have found many apologists, on the ground that the negroes are licentious and dishonest--as, indeed, many of them are. But who set them the example, and educated them in these vices? In too many cases the white population, and even their legal authorities.

I hope to God you will not ask me to go to any other country except my own. It may turn out to be another Bosque Redondo.

I refuse to play the game of American scholars who only see genocide when it occurs for Europeans. American slavery was just as much a genocide as ever occurred in Nazi Germany.

Whites looking for gold kill Indians just as they would kill bears and pay no regard for treaties.

Whoever says that sanctions will only deteriorate the situations of blacks in South Africa does not know the criminal, murderous character of genocide that represents the system of apartheid.

Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington.

Looking at the numbers, the transatlantic slave trade matches the Holocaust in horror - maybe even without counting subsidiary effects like internal strife and deaths inflected on the continent, death during transport, death during ownership, collapse of African economies, and such.

Race is such a contentious issue because of the painful history of racism. Race didn't create racism, but racism created race.

America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.

Think about the amount of crap the US has done! Between slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans - if any of that had been filmed like [Adolf] Hitler, we'd never live it down.

So now I'm going to forget the 400 years of lynching and killing raping and depriving my people feeding of justice and equality and the lowest of low last respect and I'm going to look at two or three white people who are trying to do right and don't see the other million who are trying to kill me? I'm not that big of a fool.

Insofar as the genocide embodied in residential schooling arises as an integral aspect of colonialism, then colonialism must be seen as constituting that source. To be in any way an apologist for colonialism is to be an active proponent of genocide.

With black people, there are 50 Hitlers over the course of history.

If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power.

Jewish people have been victims of anti-Semitism in many parts of the world, and in Europe they were the target of the Holocaust, the ultimate abomination. Yet, we cannot expect Palestinians to accept this as a reason why the wrongs done to them.

When someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible, because what it means is that the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.