Aboriginal Quotes - Page 4

• Sadly, today there are only a few remaining speakers of kakadu or gagadju. The work, then, is concerned with my feelings about this place, its landscape, its change of seasons, its dry season and its wet, its cycle of life and death the melodic material in Kakadu, as in much of my recent music, was suggested by the contours and rhythms of Aboriginal chant.

  Peter Sculthorpe

  Cycle Of Life, Life And Death, Feelings

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• In every civilized society there is found a race of men who retain the instincts of the aboriginal cannibal and live upon their fellow-men as a natural food.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Men, Race, Fellow Man

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• Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ.

  John Henry Newman

  Christ, Vicars, Conscience

  John Henry Newman (1875). “A Letter Addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk: On Occasion of Mr. Gladstone's Recent Expostulation”, p.73

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• In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Law, Liberty

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2009). “The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.378, Modern Library

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• Yes, I am Aboriginal but I have the right to be avant-garde like any white artist.

  Tracey Moffatt

  Artist, White, Avant Garde

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• Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena.

  Terence McKenna

  Vocabulary, Long, People

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• The name Kylie can be used for Scrabble, as it is an aboriginal word for boomerang. Which is why Ms Minogue is so good at comebacks.

  Kathy Lette

  Names, Scrabble, Comeback

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• If you are sitting on the title of any block of land in New South Wales you can bet an Aboriginal person at some stage was dispossessed of it.

  Paul Keating

  Block, Land, Titles

  Source: www.theguardian.com

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• Reconciliation will not work if it puts a higher value on symbolic gestures and overblown promises rather than the practical needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in areas like health, housing, education and employment.

  Warren Mundine

  Promise, Needs, Employment

  Source: www.sbs.com.au

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• The largely hidden key to the symbolic world is time; indeed it is at the origin of human symbolic activity. Time thus occasions the first alienation, the route away from aboriginal richness and wholeness.

  John Zerzan

  Keys, World, Firsts

  John Zerzan (2002). “Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilisation”

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• As far as I'm concerned, any Aboriginal that gets out there and accepts money that has been put out as a package for this bicentenary is actually accepting blood money. We've still got people with leprosy and we still got tremendous problems. These problems have not been our problems, they're the problems of the European population of Australia.

  Warren Mundine

  Blood, Australia, People

  "The Observer Effect " with Ellen Fanning, www.sbs.com.au. September 8, 2013.

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• It's an old Aboriginal word meaning 'Let's get together and have fun'. They gave us the word because they had no further need for it.

  Barry Humphries

  Fun, Together, Needs

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• Many people just won't connect the social problems with the history of dispossession of the aboriginals. There is one problem with pro-Palestinian activists in Europe and the U.S. with the way they portray Israel as though it were an island of evil in an ocean of goodwill. Unfortunately we are not. This world is not made of benign, progressive states with Israel as the one exception.

  Amira Hass

  Ocean, Islands, Israel

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• To me, no painter has ever quite understood the light, the distances, the aboriginal ghostliness of the American West as well as Maynard Dixon. The great mood of his work is solitude, the effect of land and space on people. While his work stands perfectly well on its claims to beauty, it offers a spiritual view of the West indispensable to anyone who would understand it.

  Thomas McGuane

  Spiritual, Distance, Views

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• In 1976 I was working in the Gulf Country around Cape York, in an aboriginal community of about 300 people. The Health Department sent around a team and vaccinated about 100 of them against flu. Six were dead within 24 hours or so and they weren't all old people, one man being in his early twenties. They threw the bodies in trucks to take to the coast where autopsies were done. It appeared they had died from heart attacks.

  Archie Kalokerinos

  Country, Team, Heart

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• I won the seat of Oxley largely on an issue that has resulted in me being called a racist. That issue related to my comment that Aboriginals received more benefits than non-Aboriginals.

  Pauline Hanson

  Issues, Racist, Benefits

  "Revisit Pauline Hanson's infamous maiden speech". www.sbs.com.au. July 19, 2016.

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• I had spent some time in the outback, but to meet Aboriginals and work with them was wonderful. It gave me a great appreciation of how tough life is and about the indomitable spirit that the Aboriginal people have always possessed.

  Hugh Jackman

  Appreciation, People, Spirit

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• The aboriginal women leaders of Papunya - the Papunya Artists - performed a dance for me: the Honey Ant dance. They'd never done it for anyone else. They honoured me with a ceremonial stick that signifies the story of the land.

  Quentin Bryce

  Artist, Land, Leader

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• I've got tonnes of aboriginal and Native American art, but I'd like even more.

  Tori Amos

  Art, Native American, Native

  "Portrait of the artist: Tori Amos, musician". Interview with Nosheen Iqbal, www.theguardian.com. January 4, 2010.

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• I assure you, Constable Morgan, I am quite sane, as I understand the word, perhaps the sanest person in this room, for I suffer from no illusions. I have freed myself, you see, from the pretense that burdens most men. Much like our prey, I do not impose order where there is none; I do not pretend there is any more than what there is, or that you and I are anything more than what we are. That is the essence of their beauty, Morgan, the aboriginal purity of their being, and why I admire them.

  Rick Yancey

  Men, Order, Essence

  Rick Yancey (2010). “The Monstrumologist: The Terror Beneath”, p.227, Simon and Schuster

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• The adoration of the sun was one of the earliest and most natural forms of religious expression. Complex modern theologies are merely involvements and amplifications of this simple aboriginal belief.

  Manly Hall

  Religious, Simple, Expression

  Manly P. Hall (2010). “The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy”, p.92, Courier Corporation

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• The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. ...[I]t is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  War, Land, Yellow

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• The Germans themselves I should regard as aboriginal, and not mixed at all with other races through immigration or intercourse. For in former times, it was not by land but on shipboard that those who sought to emigrate would arrive; and the boundless and, so to speak, hostile ocean beyond us,is seldom entered by a sail from our world.

  Tacitus

  Ocean, Our World, Race

  Tacitus (1851). “Germania by Tacitus”, p.2, Charles River Editors

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• Every person is a Hindu who regards and owns this Bharat Bhumi, this land from the Indus to the seas, as his Fatherland as well as Holyland, i.e. the land of the origin of his religion... Consequently the so-called aboriginal or hill tribes also are Hindus: because India is their Fatherland as well as their Holyland of whatever form of religion or worship they follow.

  Vinayak Damodar Savarkar

  Sea, Land, Tribes

  "Hindu Rashtra Darshan". Book by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, 1949.

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• Beyond Bookchin”, David Watson, of Fifth Estate, argues that aboriginal society represents a viable Utopia. He quotes favourably the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins; “We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don’t have anything, perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free.

  Marshall Sahlins

  Thinking, Hunters, Arguing

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