Daily Inspiration Quote by Sitting Bull

A single sentence, and Sitting Bull flips the entire mythology of “progress” into an indictment. He grants the colonizer a backhanded compliment - mastery of production, of machines, of “making everything” - then exposes the moral vacuum at the center: if you can build abundance but can’t (or won’t) share it, what kind of civilization is that?

The line works because it weaponizes the era’s favorite self-congratulation. Nineteenth-century America loved to narrate westward expansion as ingenuity and destiny: railroads, factories, new markets. Sitting Bull reframes that story as an economy of extraction, where the impressive logistics of making are inseparable from the deliberate logistics of withholding. “Does not know how to distribute it” isn’t a technical critique; it’s a political one. Distribution here means land, food, safety, dignity - the basic conditions of life that were systematically denied to Indigenous nations even as the state marketed itself as modern.

The subtext is sharper: this isn’t ignorance, it’s a choice dressed up as inevitability. Settler society can organize armies, treaties, and supply chains across a continent; it can certainly organize fairness if fairness is the goal. By phrasing it as a missing “knowledge,” Sitting Bull lets the dominant culture condemn itself on its own terms. If your measure of greatness is competence, then incompetence at justice is failure - and the results are visible in reservations, broken promises, and manufactured scarcity amid plenty.