42 Quotes by Thomas King

If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.

Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one? – Lee Maracle, Ravensong.

For an individual, one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again in the same way and expecting different results. For a government, such behaviour is called... policy.

I learned very quickly that to be angry about something does not mean anybody’s gonna listen to you.

This is a Christian world, you know. We only kill things that are useful or things we don’t like.

History may well be a series of stories we tell about the past, but the stories are not just any stories. They’re not chosen by chance. By and large, the stories are about famous men and celebrated events. We throw in a couple of exceptional women every now and then, not out of any need to recognize female eminence, but out of embarrassment.

To be sure, they have had the occasional success, but there is little chance that North America will develop a functional land ethic until it finds a way to overcome its irrational addiction to profit.

Why do we ask the important questions after they’ve been answered?

Indeed, North America Indian policy in the last half of the nineteenth century had many of the qualities of a bad movie. It was a low-budget affair with a simplistic plot: politicians, soldiers, clerics, social scientists, and people of unexamined goodwill dash about North America, saving themselves from Indians by saving Indians from themselves.