Tribe Quotes

What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders. (John Updike)
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. View quote
Rudyard Kipling
It is important to tell good stories. You can tell stories even if they are not huge, epic, and wonderful. You can still take the responsibility for being a scribe of your tribe. View quote
Ajay Naidu
I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth; religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession, which I was trying to throw off, and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result. View quote
Laurence Housman
A true community consists of individuals - not mere species members, not couples - respecting each others individuality and privacy while at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally - free spirits in free relation to each other - and co-operating with each other to achieve common ends. Traditionalists say the basic unit of "society" is the family; "hippies" say the tribe; noone says the individual. View quote
Valerie Solanas
Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe, requires imagination-- devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues -- which a man must develop himself; if he has them forced down him, he will vomit them out. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe ... I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul. View quote
Derek Walcott
On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago. View quote
Norman Mailer
I hope through The L Word to become an honorary member of the gay tribe. I cherish the thought that some young girl or woman somewhere may one night turn on the television and for the first time ever see her life represented -- not as an isolated incident but as a multiplicity. Her overwhelming fear may have been that she might never find her tribe, she might never find love and now she knows that they are both out there waiting for her. View quote
Jennifer Beals
However, withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Hard to explain that to the young. we may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separate tribe. View quote
Ian McEwan
Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line. (Ambrose Bierce)
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature. View quote
George Bernard Shaw
Mengistu seemed to symbolize the revolution. He was the baria, the slave who overthrew the master, the member of the conquered tribe who got even with the conquerors, the poorly educated son of a servant who rose against the intellectual elite. View quote
Mengistu Haile Mariam
His tribe were God Almighty's gentlemen. View quote
John Dryden
Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. View quote
Chief Seattle
Strike an enemy once and for all. Let him cease to exist as a tribe or he will live to fly in your throat again. View quote
Shaka
Man can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet he's potentially more vicious than any other. He is the only one who can be persuaded to hate millions of his own kind whom he has never seen and to kill as many as he can lay his hands on in the name of his tribe or his God. View quote
Benjamin Spock
As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times. View quote
Gary Snyder
Little minds mistake little objects for great ones, and lavish away upon the former that time and attention which only the latter deserve. To such mistakes we owe the numerous and frivolous tribe of insect-mongers, shell-mongers, and pursuers and driers of butterflies, etc. The strong mind distinguishes, not only between the useful and the useless, but likewise between the useful and the curious. View quote
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Leaders lead when they take positions, when they connect with their tribes, and when they help the tribe connect to itself. View quote
Seth Godin
Three classes inhabited the city (Alexandria in Egypt): first the Aegyptian or native stock of people, who were quick-tempered and not inclined to civil life; and secondly the mercenary class, who were severe and numerous and intractable...; and, third, the tribe of the Alexandrians, who also were not distinctly inclined to civil life, and for the same reasons, but still they were better than those others, for even though they were a mixed people, still they were Greeks by origin and mindful of the customs common to the Greeks. (Strabo)
Dying people in pre-industrial cultures typically died in the context of an extended family, clan, or tribe. View quote
Stanislav Grof
By incestuous symbiosis is meant the tendency to stay tied to the mother and to her equivalents - blood, family, tribe - to fly from the unbearable weight of responsibility, of freedom, of awareness, and to be protected and loved in a state of certainty dependence that the individual pays for with the ceasing of his own human development. View quote
Erich Fromm
Physiologically adult humans are not meant to spend an additional 10 years in a school system; their brains map that onto "I have been assigned low tribal status". And so, of course, they plot rebellion - accuse the existing tribal overlords of corruption plot, perhaps to split off their own little tribe in the savanna, not realizing that this is impossible in the Modern World. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
American statesmen might like some Europeans more than others and even detect quaint resemblances to their own outlook; but they no more committed themselves to a particular group or country than a nineteenth-century missionary committed himself to the African tribe in which he happened to find himself. View quote
A. J. P. Taylor