Bo Burnham Quotes

It's a bit of a sore spot, the Thanksgiving in Indian country.

Thanksgiving began in 1621 when Native Americans sat down with a bunch of undocumented pilgrims. They had dinner and the pilgrims never left.

My obsessions stay the same - historical memory and historical erasure. I am particularly interested in the Americas and how a history that is rooted in colonialism, the language and iconography of empire, disenfranchisement, the enslavement of peoples, and the way that people were sectioned off because of blood.

I have four relatively small children, and around fourth grade, they start doing big projects on Native Americas: everything is Native Americans in elementary school. Do you know how many Native American dresses I've sewn, on and on; it's a full yearlong study. And then never again. As journalists, we never even cover Native Americans.

Australia has a very big history of incarceration. What does that mean to us? What does it mean that we came over to a country that's not necessarily ours and filled it with white prisoners?

In 1492, the natives discovered they were Indians; they discovered they lived in America.

When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.

You'd never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.

The great joy of doing 'The Daily Show' for me is that I get to sit on the fence between cultures. I am commenting on the absurdity of both sides as an outsider and insider. Sometimes I'm playing the brown guy, and sometimes I'm not, but the best stuff I do always goes back to being a brown kid in a white world.

[Describing the Croatan Indians the English explorers met in Sir Walter Raleigh's first expedition to Virginia: ... very handsome and goodly people, and in their behavior as mannerly and civil as any in Europe.

These tribes cannot exist surrounded by our settlements and continual contact with our citizens. They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement. They must necessarily yield to the force of circumstance and, ere long, disappear.

They [Native Americans] should not be allowed to come into the settlements, for every visit an Indian makes to a town, it is more or less injury to him.

Before the palefaces came among us, we enjoyed the happiness of unbounded freedom and were acquainted with neither riches, wants, nor oppression.

One of the first things people think of when they think of Native Americans is reservations. We didn't have any idea what that was. We were just young kids growing up in normal blue-collar America.

When it comes to American Indians, mainstream America suffers from willful blindness.

I'm Native American, so the racial thing kind of hits home with me.

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Or, as it's known to Native Americans - Sarcastic You're Welcomesgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I'm thankful for all of you. I am not thankful for the pilgrims. Buckles should never be on hats.

The Portuguese, Dutch and English have been for a long time year after year, shipping home the treasures of India in their big vessels. We Germans have been all along been left to watch it. Germany would do likewise, but hers would be treasures of spiritual knowledge.

Thanksgiving, when the Indians said, "Well, this has been fun, but we know you have a long voyage back to England".

Holocaust? Ninety million Indians? Only four million left? They all have casinos - what's to complain about?

In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the State takes it over?

We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.

Back in those days, all us skinny white British kids were trying to look cool and sound black. And there was Hendrix, the ultimate in black cool. Everything he did was natural and perfect.

The Afro-American experience is the only real culture that America has. Basically, every American tries to walk, talk, dress and behave like African Americans.