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When I grew up in India, telephones were a rarity. In fact, they were so rare that elected members of Parliament had the right to allocate 15 telephone lines as a favor to those they deemed worthy. If you were lucky enough to be a wealthy businessman or an influential journalist, or a doctor or something, you might have a telephone.

The telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink.

I thought I was benefiting the Indians as well as the government, by taking them all over the United States, and giving them a correct idea of the customs, life, etc., of the pale faces, so that when they returned to their people they could make known all they had seen.

Nobody would take checks from Indians, nobody would give them any credit, and nobody would let them drink in the bars. There was a rudeness, a brusqueness, with which the Indians were treated constantly. At a very young age, that had entered my consciousness.

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.

The phone is one hundred, one hundred and ten years old. There was a middle period where the government had a broad ability to surveil, but if you look at human history in total, people evolved and civilizations evolved with private conversations and private speech.

There was such a relationship between the buffalo and the American Indian - the Indians would eat them, live inside their pelts, use every part of the body. There was almost no separation between the people and the animals.

We're visual creatures. Probably, when we were hunter gatherers... that was the kind of thing that mattered. And remembering, say, phone numbers was, like, not that important when you're hunting down a mastodon or whatever.

If I could write a story that would do for the Indian one-hundredth part what 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' did for the Negro, I would be thankful the rest of my life.

The townspeople outside the reservations had a very superior attitude toward Indians, which was kind of funny, because they weren't very wealthy; they were on the fringes of society themselves.