Sherman Alexie Quotes

Day and night cannot dwell together. The Red Man has ever fled the approach of the White Man, as the morning mist flees before the morning sun.

Religious-based and ethnic-based schools act as points of division in society, often breeding prejudice and fear …

The defining mode of conflict in the era ahead is ethnic conflict.

The Western world is having an identity crisis.

I think really the whole problem with racism and its continuing legacy in this country is that we simply love it. Who would we be without the 'struggle?'

Things have not changed as much as we would like to think they have. Or maybe we're just in another one of the divided moments in the country. The late '60s certainly was one of them, the Civil War being another, but I'm hard-pressed to think of too many.

I think fundamentalism is this radical attitude toward one's own identity and civilization as compared to other people's identities and cultures.

A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern.

You've got the whole stuff with transgender toilets and stuff like that - that's no way for a government to behave. We're supposed to be against ISIS, so why are we trying to slowly introduce a country-club version of Sharia law in America, you know? It doesn't make any real sense at all. I think there's going to be a lot of energy, there is already a lot of reaction against that - people are prepared to really stand up and be counted for democracy, and in the process to find out what is and what isn't.

It's bizarre: I've tried to understand why people are into Trump. I really don't think I can. I don't think it's as simple as just racism. I do think there's a fear that white people have, even if they don't have a vicious desire to do harm to black people, they fear losing their top spot.

The fact is Donald Trump is trying to divide Americans along racial and ethnic lines, and it's unhealthy for the country.

Because of the internet and communications, the clash of cultures is much more direct. People feel, I think, less certain about their identity, less certain about economic security.

What Donald Trump has done is to make it possible for people who had racist, sexist, and all kinds of prejudices and bigotry to put them right out there.

I think America has always been polarized... It's a racist country and it has always been.

I think that having a black president in this country has been a seismic shift, in terms of what has been going on racially in America. I think that America is now engaging with how we have come to this point.

You'd have civil war. You'd have a race war in this country.

I think there's an awakening now of a realization that we too early congratulated ourselves on the end of racial prejudice and white supremacy. And that was a feeling that we had when I was president, that we had pretty much overcome that problem.

People feel certain things. Hispanics feel certain things towards blacks. Blacks feel certain things towards other groups. It's been that way historically and it will always be that way.

The national media which I consider to be very racist against European Americans and I think they have caused the incitement of African Americans against European Americans.I also think that they have also facilitated European Americans being angry at African Americans.

A story went the rounds about a San Franciscan white matron who refused to sit beside a Negro civilian on the streetcar, even after he made room for her on the seat. Her explanation was that she would not sit beside a draft dodger who was a Negro as well. She added that the least he could do was fight for his country the way her son was fighting on Iwo Jima. The story said that the man pulled his body away from the window to show an armless sleeve. He said quietly and with great dignity, "Then ask your son to look around for my arm, which I left over there.

What the apartheid system was really good at doing was convincing groups to hate one another.

Learning can cause social fracture. Your people start expressing themselves.

It's hard when the worst people in the country are cheering, the people with the confederate flag, the people that do anti-Semitism on Twitter, that's difficult for a lot of people in this country. But, you know, I do think an inaugural, for example, is almost always an act of national healing.

One of the sad things, I think, about the younger generation, quite frankly, is they have less sense of yesterday. And if you don't know who you were, you don't really know who you are.

We are used to thinking of the Arabs as primitive men of the desert, as a donkey-like nation that neither sees nor understands what is going around it. But this is a GREAT ERROR. The Arab, like all sons of Sham, has sharp and crafty mind . . . Should time come when life of our people in Palestine imposes to a smaller or greater extent on the natives, they WILL NOT easily step aside.