Sherman Alexie Quotes

Commerce has not delivered us out of history’s passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith.

The capacity for humans to come up with ever-increasingly granular in-group versus out-group demarcations is truly breathtaking.

I'm interested in human nature. That's why I chose to become an actor. Whatever people are struggling with, the struggle is often where the drama is.

the people are the biggest horror show on earth, have been for centuries.

People are brutal. Just to each other.

I can't stand what people do to each other. I think we're brilliant as a species. I think we are amazing. I think that God is incredible, that He just gave us everything. Everything in our face. Everything for us to use. And sometimes we're such shitheads. And it makes me crazy.

Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture.

The last six years afforded me much time and food for thought. I came to the conclusion that the human race is not divided into two opposing camps of good and evil. It is made up of those who are capable of learning and those who are incapable of doing so.

And now that you are out? How does the world seem to you?" he says. "Mostly the same," I say. "People are just divided by different things, fighting different wars.

Ninety-five percent of people who walk the earth are simply inert. One percent are saints, and one percent are assholes. The other three percent are people who do what they say they can do.

Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.

People are funny. They want the front of the bus, the middle of the road and the back of the church. —Mrs. Miracle

Maybe it was the same with people: if you studied them,you'd see new and different things. But would you like what you saw? Did it depend on who was doing the looking?

Whether in a suit or in a loincloth people are ignorant little thorns cutting into one another. They seem incapable of advancing beyond the violent tendencies which at one time were necessary for survival.

"I used to think the world was broken down by tribes," I said. "By black and white. By Indian and white. But I know that isn't true. The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not."

However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.

Polarization affects families and groups of friends. Its a paralyzing situation. A civil war of opinion.

But we are what we are, and humans will always hate.

It's not that big a mystery about types. It's not even that big a mystery why so many people are picking up on things now. It's like we were talking about the primitive thing before and all that. Nothing has really changed much. The things that have changed are like we're on the noon now. There are more buildings now. But we're still basically two monkeys sitting here.

For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.

People say life ain't fairlife is very fair. People aren't fairpeople are terrible.

I believe that women are many different types of people. There are brave women, there are cowardly women, there are altruistic women, there are selfish women. Most people are a combination of the same.

Dogmas take endless forms, and when you can persuade different people to hold opposing dogmas, the manipulation of conflict and control through "divide and rule" becomes easy. It is happening today in the same way - more so, in fact - as it has throughout human history.

Japoneese people take themselves very serious and you can see it by everything they do - it's like a different part of the scale or spectrum in being a human, and it's something we're not used to seeing in America. And then when you see it, you do have the moments of infatuation; you get caught up in it, but there's so much more to it.

From time immemorial, people have talked about peace without achieving it. Do we simply lack enough experience? Though we talk peace, we wage war. Sometimes we even wage war in the name of peace. . . . War may be too much a part of history to be eliminated—ever.