Quotes about buffalo (34 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“I will remain what I am until I die, a hunter, and when there are no buffalo or other game I will send my children to hunt and live on prairie, for where an Indian is shut up in one place his body becomes weak.”

Sitting Bull (1831–1890) Hunkpapa Lakota medicine man and holy man

Recorded by James M. Walsh, inspector in the Northwest Territory of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, at a conference with Sitting Bull on March 23, 1879. Published in Utley, Robert M. The Lance and the Shield. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993. p. 206.

Children , Game

“Khufu carefully picked out everything that ended with-o—Doritos, Oreos, and some chunks of meat. Buffalo? Armadillo? I was scared to even ask.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

“Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Death , Boy

“Either the kid was naturally hyper or he was hopped up on enough caffeine to give a heart attack to a water buffalo.”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

Nature , Water , Heart

“Well, you have to work out what it is. They are a little splinter. They can't summon many voters at any given time. They are a minority of a minority of a minority. They have everybody buffaloed because the great corporations like them and pay money to their candidates for sheriff and senator. And they're playing big-time politics. Yes, indeed. But the average person doesn't like them. You know, any time I want to get applause — and I lecture across America in state after state after state — when I fear things are getting a little low, I always say, “And another thing: Let us tax all the religions,” I bring down the goddamn house with that. And any politician would if he had sense enough to do it. The people don't like their tax exemption.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

On the religious right in America http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=342
2000s, What I've Learned (2008), Gore Vidal's America (2009)

Money , People , Fear , Religion

“I like to watch old films. Meet Me in St Louis, Cul-de-Sac and Buffalo 66 are some of my favourites.”

Stella Vine (1969) English artist

Williams-Akoto. "My Home: Stella Vine, artist" http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/house-and-home/property/my-home-stella-vine-artist-517456.html, The Independent, (2005-11-30)
On her favourite films.

“What a curious portrait this is for the supposed founder of a religion. The Old Boy didn't preach. He didn't organize or promote. He wrote a few pages on request, rode off on a water buffalo, and that was it was far as he was concerned.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

On Lao-Tzu, the legendary author of the Tao Te Ching and founder of Taoism.
The World's Religions (1991)

Religion , Boy , Water

“He’s engaged to be married to Stiffy Byng, and his long years of football should prove an excellent preparation for setting up house with her. The way I look at it is that when a fellow has had plug-uglies in cleated boots doing a Shuffle-off-to-Buffalo on his face Saturday after Saturday since he was a slip of a boy, he must get to fear nothing, not even marriage with a girl like Stiffy, who from early childhood has seldom let the sun go down without starting some loony enterprise calculated to bleach the hair of one and all.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (1963)

Marriage , Fear , Way , Girl

“Humans are the animals that manufacture weakness. We take wolves and we make them into dogs. We take buffalo and we make them into cows. We take stallions and we make them into geldings. We make things weak so that we may use them.”

Mark Rowlands (1962) British philosopher

The Philosopher and the Wolf https://books.google.it/books?id=FSJbBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT0 (Pegasus Books, 2009), ch. 4.

Dogs , Animals

“Having a good and cultured family background was not enough to be successful in politics. One should live amidst farmers, till land, and tend cows and buffaloes.”

H. D. Deve Gowda (1933) Indian politician

On being compared with Hegde, a suave opponent
Source: Gopal K. Kadekodi, et al., Development in Karnataka: Challenges of Governance, Equity, and Empowerment http://books.google.co.in/books?id=YpjqJz_RbncC&pg=PA99&dq=Devegowda&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Lpy6U9fAJ4ejkwXp54DwDA&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Devegowda&f=false, Academic Foundation, 2008 P.98

Family , Success

“We believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound one to another, that the problems of a retired school teacher in Duluth are our problems; that the future of the child — that the future of the child in Buffalo is our future; that the struggle of a disabled man in Boston to survive and live decently is our struggle; that the hunger of a woman in Little Rock is our hunger; that the failure anywhere to provide what reasonably we might, to avoid pain, is our failure.”

Mario Cuomo (1932–2015) American politician, Governor of New York

Democratic National Convention Address (1984)

Hunger , Pain , School , Family

“There are those who are willing to be herded in droves through 'scenic' places; who find mountains grand if they be proper mountains, with waterfalls, cliffs, and lakes. To such the Kansas plains are tedious. They see the endless corn, but not the heave and grunt of ox teams breaking the prairie. History, for them, grows on campuses. They look at the low horizon, but they cannot see it, as de Vaca did, under the bellies of the buffalo.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

" Country http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/AldoLeopold/AldoLeopold-idx?type=turn&entity=AldoLeopold.ALDeskFile.p0666&id=AldoLeopold.ALDeskFile&isize=XL" [1941]; Published in Round River, Luna B. Leopold (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 32-33.
1940s

History , Mountain

“My ears open nasals! beware! such joy is yours o my people to sense see ear scent drink everything everything everything taratatatatata the machineguns shouting twisting under a thousand bites slaps traaktraak cudgellings whippings pic pac POUMTOUMB juggling clowns’ jump in full sky height 200 meters it's the gunshooting Downwards guffaws of swamps laughter buffalos chariots stings prancing of horses ammunition-wagons flue flac zang chaak chaak rearings pirouettes patatraak bespatterings manesneighings i i i i i i i medley tinklings three bulgarian batallions on the move crook- craak (double bar slowly) Choumi Maritza o Karvavena officers' shouts copper plates knocking against each other pam ici (vite) pac over there BOUM-pam-pam-pam here there there farther all around very high look-out goddamnit on the head chaak marvelous! flames flames flames flames flames flames flames crawl from forts over there Choukri Pacha telephone orders to 27 forts in turkish German hello Ibrahim! Rudolf hello! hello! actors roles blowing-echoes odor-hay-mud-manure I can't feel my frozen feet stale odor rotting gongs flutes clarinets pipes everywhere up down birds twitter beatitude shade greenness cipcip ip-zzip herds pastures dong-dong-dong-ding-bééé Orchestra”

Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) Electronic music pioneer and Futurist painter

Source: 1910's, The Art of Noise', 1913, p. 8

People , Feeling , Drink , Bird

“.. those who view the history of North America as a narrative of genocide and slavery are, it seems to me, hopelessly stuck on this reactionary position. They can think of the Western expansion of the United States only in terms of plague blankets, bootleg booze and dead buffalo, never in terms of the medicine chest, the wheel and the railway.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"Minority Report", The Nation, October 19, 1992; also in Salaita, p. 68.
1990s

History , Thinking , Dead

“Venerable Svasti and the young buffalo boys were rivers that flowed from that source. Wherever the rivers flowed, the Buddha would be there.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Old Path White Clouds : Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha (1991) Parallax Press ISBN 81-216-0675-6

Boy

“Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around — not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition's sake.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Way

“It is a better world with some buffalo left in it, a richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by signboards, hot-dog stands, super highways, or high-tension lines, undrowned by power or irrigation reservoirs. If we preserved as parks only those places that have no economic possibilities, we would have no parks. And in the decades to come, it will not be only the buffalo and the trumpeter swan who need sanctuaries. Our own species is going to need them too. It needs them now.”

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) American historian, writer, and environmentalist

This is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and its Magic Rivers is a collection of essays and photographs edited by Wallace Stegner and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1955. This passage is from the collection's first essay, "The Marks of Human Passage", which is by Stegner (page 17).

World , Dogs

“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”

Crowfoot (1830–1890) Chief of the Siksika

Crowfoot's last words, 1890; reported in ‎Clark Tibbitts, Aging in the Modern World: Selections from the Literature of Aging for Pleasure and Instruction (1957), p. 222.

Life , Grass , Night

“Mel H. Buffalo, an advisor to the Samson [Cree] band in Hobbema, Alberta, reported that "every Indian person I've spoken to who attended these schools has a story of mental, physical or sexual abuse to relate."”

Ward Churchill (1947) Political activist

[Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools, City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA, November 2004, 64, 0872864340]
Churchill's source: [Miller, J.R., Shingwauk's Vision: A History of the Indian Residential Schools, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, May 24, 1996, 333, 0802078583]

School , Personality

“Victor: White people won't respect you if you don't look mean. You have to look like a warrior, like you just got back from killing a buffalo.
Thomas: But our tribe never hunted buffalo. We were fishermen.
Victor: What, you want to look like you just caught a fish? This isn't Dances with Salmon, you know!”

Sherman Alexie (1966) Native American author and filmmaker

Smoke Signals (1998)

People , Fish , Dance

“The world's strongest animals are plant eaters. Gorillas, buffaloes, elephants and me.”

Patrik Baboumian (1979) German strength-athlete

From his print ad for PETA, in “‘Strongest Man’ Eats Plants, Loves Animals,” in peta.org (21 November 2011) https://www.peta.org/blog/strongest-man-eats-plants-loves-animals/.

World , Animals

“The Hindu was taxed to the extent of half the produce of his land, and had to pay duties on all his buffaloes, goats, and other milk-cattle. The taxes were to be levied equally on rich and poor, at so much per acre, so much per animal. Any collectors or officers taking bribes were summarily dismissed and heavily punished with sticks, pincers, the rack, imprisonment and chains. The new rules were strictly carried out, so that one revenue officer would string together 20 Hindu notables and enforce payment by blows. No gold or silver, not even the betelnut, so cheering and stimulative to pleasure, was to be seen in a Hindu house, and the wives of the impoverished native officials were reduced to taking service in Muslim families. Revenue officers came to be regarded as more deadly than the plague; and to be a government clerk was disgrace worse than death, in so much that no Hindu would marry his daughter to such a man. … [These edicts] were so strictly carried out that the chaukidars and khuts and muqad-dims were not able to ride on horseback, to find weapon, to wear fine clothes, or to indulge in betel.. …. No Hindu could hold up his head. ….. Blows, confinement in the stocks, imprisonment and chains were all employed to enforce payment.”

Stanley Lane-Poole (1854–1931) British orientalist

Lane Poole : Medieval India, quoted from B.R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

Death , Pleasure , Family , Animals

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter IV

Death , Men , Dreams , Color

“Mackieson gave me the other day a buffalo hide whip from Africa called in those regions a Peace Maker and used as such in the households of chieftains. Our Peace Makers are our Armstrongs and Whitworths and our engineers.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Letter to Austen Henry Layard (23 October 1864), quoted in Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London: Constable, 1970), p. 590.
1860s

Peace

“Red Dog smiled. 'I would like you to meet my friends Mr Sitting Bull, Mr Poisoned Buffalo, and Chief Running Skunk-Backwards.'
'Sitting Bull's a name I know,' Yogi remarked, shaking hands.
'Oh, I'm not one of those Sitting Bulls,' Mr Sitting Bull said.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Torrents of Spring

Part 3, Ch. 2
The Torrents of Spring (1926)

Smile , Dogs

“When I first began working with baboons, my main problem was learning to keep up with them while remaining alert to poisonous snakes, irascible buffalo, aggressive bees, and leg-breaking pig holes. Fortunately, these challenges eased over time, mainly because I was traveling in the company of expert guides—baboons who could spot a predator a mile away and seemed to possess a sixth sense for the proximity of snakes. Abandoning myself to their far superior knowledge, I moved as a humble disciple, learning from masters about being an African anthropoid. Thus I became (or, rather, regained my ancestral right to be) an animal, moving instinctively through a world that felt (because it was) like my ancient home.”

Barbara Smuts (1950) American anthropologist

Source: Reflections (1999), p. 109

World , Travel , Home , Knowledge

“in the lost luggage office in Buffalo
Lost luggage employee: Can I help you?
Engvall: Yes, you lost my luggage.
Employee: [looking directly at Bill] Has your plane landed yet?
Engvall: No, princess. I'm having an out of body experience. I'm just checkin' on it.”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

Blue Collar Comedy Tour: The Movie (2003)
Here's Your Sign

Help , Princess

“I have always felt that the camera hasn't liked me. I'm a stage animal. I have to be big and loud, and the camera needs you to be small and naturalistic and subtle; much more naturalistic. I'm as subtle as a buffalo stampede.”

Richard Burton (1925–1984) Welsh actor

In Richard Burton Biography http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000009/bio, IMDb

Animals

“I'm not a career filmmaker and by that I'm not tearing down people who are, but I'm not Wes Anderson who can rent out a floor at the Chateau Marmont for a month to write my new screenplay--I have a life outside of filmmaking and after Buffalo '66, I genuinely thought I was done with making movies. But they pulled me back in. This Brown Bunny, it had something in it for me that I just had to say. I had to express it, it was in me and it ate its way out of me. I wished that it didn't, but it did and I was surprised to find myself shooting again.”

Vincent Gallo (1961) American film director, writer, model, actor and musician

Film Freak Central Interview

Life , People , Way , Tear

“Marilyn Quayle was there, too, looking – it was indeed a strange week in Washington – great. She had her hair done up in something my wife said was a chignon, and whatever it was, it made Marilyn look considerably less like a Cape buffalo than usual. Though actually I admired the Cape buffalo look. I have an idea that – like a Cape buffalo – if Marilyn Quayle gets furious and charges, you've got only one shot at the skull. You wouldn't want to just wound her.”

P. J. O'Rourke book Parliament of Whores

Parliament of Whores (1991)

Idea

“Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?”

Leó Szilárd (1898–1964) Physicist and biologist

"President Truman Did Not Understand" http://www.peak.org/~danneng/decision/usnews.html in U.S. News & World Report (15 August 1960)
Variant: If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.
As quoted in The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (1996) by Dennis Wainstock, p. 122
Context: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?
But, again, don't misunderstand me. The only conclusion we can draw is that governments acting in a crisis are guided by questions of expediency, and moral considerations are given very little weight, and that America is no different from any other nation in this respect.

Death , War

“Whereas some ascetics and Brahmins remain addicted to attending such shows as dancing, singing, music, displays, recitations, hand-music, cymbals and drums, fairy-shows, acrobatic and conjuring tricks, combats of elephants, buffaloes, bulls, goats, rams, cocks and quail, fighting with staves, boxing, wrestling, sham-fights, parades, manoeuvres and military reviews, the ascetic Gotama refrains from attending such displays.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

M. Walshe, trans. (1987), Sutta 1, verse 1.13
Pali Canon, Sutta Pitaka, Digha Nikaya (Long Discourses)

Singing , Box , Music , Dance

“I think he’s very good and very blessed to be operating behind those five guys. That’s the big problem, having to sort through those five big guys to find where he is. When they all come off at one time they look like a herd of water buffalo stampeding at you and there’s a gazelle somewhere in behind them. He’s also very persistent and you can see how strong he is.”

Javon Ringer (1987) All-American college football player, professional football player, running back

Florida Atlantic head coach Howard Schnellenberger, quoted at Ringer 23.com (undated)

Time , Strong , Problem , Water

“At first sight, domesticated animals may seem much better off than their wild cousins and ancestors. Wild buffaloes spend their days searching for food, water and shelter, and are constantly threatened by lions, parasites, floods and droughts. Domesticated cattle, by contrast, enjoy care and protection from humans. People provide cows and calves with food, water and shelter, they treat their diseases, and protect them from predators and natural disasters. True, most cows and calves sooner or later find themselves in the slaughterhouse. Yet does that make their fate any worse than that of wild buffaloes? Is it better to be devoured by a lion than slaughtered by a man? Are crocodile teeth kinder than steel blades?”

Yuval Noah Harari (1976) Israeli historian

" Industrial farming is one of the worst crimes in history https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/25/industrial-farming-one-worst-crimes-history-ethical-question", The Guardian, 25 Sept. 2011

Food , Fate , Search , People