Tonga Quotes

We can leave a place behind, or we can stay in that place and leave our selfishness (often expressed in feeling sorry for ourselves) behind. If we leave a place and take our selfishness with us, the cycle of problems starts all over again no matter where we go. But if we leave our selfishness behind, no matter where we are, things start to improve.

We earned a living at this time by my exhibiting poor Tonga at fairs and other such places as the black cannibal. He would eat raw meat and dance his war-dance: so we always had a hatful of pennies after a day's work.

AUCKLAND A TURTLE WHICH EXPLORER CAPTAIN COOK GAVE TO THE KING OF TONGA IN 1777 DIED YESTERDAY. IT WAS NEARLY 200 YEARS OLD. THE ANIMAL, CALLED TU’IMALILA, DIED AT THE ROYAL PALACE GROUND IN THE TONGAN CAPITAL OF NUKU, ALOFA.

Every generation of children instinctively nests itself in nature, no matter matter how tiny a scrap of it they can grasp. In a tale of one city child, the poet Audre Lord remembers picking tufts of grass which crept up through the paving stones in New York City and giving them as bouquets to her mother. It is a tale of two necessities. The grass must grow, no matter the concrete suppressing it. The child must find her way to the green, no matter the edifice which would crush it. "The Maori word for placenta is the same word for land, so at birth the placenta is buried, put back in the mothering earth. A Hindu baby may receive the sun-showing rite surya-darsana when, with conch shells ringing to the skies, the child is introduced to the sun. A newborn child of the Tonga people 'meets' the moon, dipped in the ocean of Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. Among some of the tribes of India, the qualities of different aspects of nature are invoked to bless the child, so he or she may have the characteristics of earth, sky and wind, of birds and animals, right down to the earthworm. Nothing is unbelonging to the child. "'My oldest memories have the flavor of earth,' wrote Frederico García Lorca. In the traditions of the Australian deserts, even from its time in the womb, the baby is catscradled in kinship with the world. Born into a sandy hollow, it is cleaned with sand and 'smoked' by fire, and everything -- insects, birds, plants, and animals -- is named to the child, who is told not only what everything is called but also the relationship between the child and each creature. Story and song weave the child into the subtle world of the Dreaming, the nested knowledge of how the child belongs. "The threads which tie the child to the land include its conception site and the significant places of the Dreaming inherited through its parents. Introduced to creatures and land features as to relations, the child is folded into the land, wrapped into country, and the stories press on the child's mind like the making of felt -- soft and often -- storytelling until the feeling of the story of the country is impressed into the landscape of the child's mind. "That the juggernaut of ants belongs to a child, belligerently following its own trail. That the twitch of an animal's tail is part of a child's own tale or storyline, once and now again. That on the papery bark of a tree may be written the songline of a child's name. That the prickles of a thornbush may have dynamic relevance to conscience. That a damp hollow by the riverbank is not an occasional place to visit but a permanent part of who you are. This is the beginning of belonging, the beginning of love. "In the art and myth of Indigenous Australia, the Ancestors seeded the country with its children, so the shimmering, pouring, circling, wheeling, spinning land is lit up with them, cartwheeling into life.... "The human heart's love for nature cannot ultimately be concreted over. Like Audre Lord's tufts of grass, will crack apart paving stones to grasp the sun. Children know they are made of the same stuff as the grass, as Walt Whitman describes nature creating the child who becomes what he sees: There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became... The early lilacs became part of this child... And the song of the phoebe-bird... In Australia, people may talk of the child's conception site as the origin of their selfhood and their picture of themselves. As Whitman wrote of the child becoming aspects of the land, so in Northern Queensland a Kunjen elder describes the conception site as 'the home place for your image.' Land can make someone who they are, giving them fragments of themselves.

off, directly or indirectly, hundreds of species of birds, insects, snails and other local inhabitants. From there, the wave of extinction moved gradually to the east, the south and the north, into the heart of the Pacific Ocean, obliterating on its way the unique fauna of Samoa and Tonga (1200 BC); the Marquis Islands (AD 1); Easter Island, the Cook Islands and Hawaii (AD 500); and finally New Zealand (AD 1200).

In the wake of Cook’s voyages, Europeans looked to the Pacific to understand their own “primitive” past, as noble savages or barbarous heathens, depending on the writer’s perspective. Tonga in the twenty-first century offered something else: a portal into premodern Europe, with its absolute monarchy, its barons and serfs, its union of church and state. Tonga wasn’t the land where time began. It was the place where time had gone back.

There was just enough room for the tonga to get through among the bullock-carts, rickshaws, cycles and pedestrians who thronged both the road and the pavement--which they shared with barbers plying their trade out of doors, fortune-tellers, flimsy tea-stalls, vegetable-stands, monkey-trainers, ear-cleaners, pickpockets, stray cattle, the odd sleepy policeman sauntering along in faded khaki, sweat-soaked men carrying impossible loads of copper, steel rods, glass or scrap paper on their backs as they yelled 'Look out! Look out!' in voices that somehow pierced though the din, shops of brassware and cloth (the owners attempting with shouts and gestures to entice uncertain shoppers in), the small carved stone entrance of the Tinny Tots (English Medium) School which opened out onto the courtyard of the reconverted haveli of a bankrupt aristocrat, and beggars--young and old, aggressive and meek, leprous, maimed or blinded--who would quietly invade Nabiganj as evening fell, attempting to avoid the police as they worked the queues in front of the cinema-halls. Crows cawed, small boys in rags rushed around on errands (one balancing six small dirty glasses of tea on a cheap tin tray as he weaved through the crowd) monkeys chattered in and bounded about a great shivering-leafed pipal tree and tried to raid unwary customers as they left the well-guarded fruit-stand, women shuffled along in anonymous burqas or bright saris, with or without their menfolk, a few students from the university lounging around a chaat-stand shouted at each other from a foot away either out of habit or in order to be heard, mangy dogs snapped and were kicked, skeletal cats mewed and were stoned, and flies settled everywhere: on heaps of foetid, rotting rubbish, on the uncovered sweets at the sweetseller's in whose huge curved pans of ghee sizzled delicioius jalebis, on the faces of the sari-clad but not the burqa-clad women, and on the horse's nostrils as he shook his blinkered head and tried to forge his way through Old Brahmpur in the direction of the Barsaat Mahal.

Tonga was even more feudal than I’d supposed. Diplomats said that it was still almost impossible for commoners to own land; most Tongans lived as tenants of the nobility. The nobles also asked for periodic “contributions” from their vassals, such as food for a daughter’s wedding. Churches made even greater demands, exacting donations that often totaled a fifth of a household’s income, and publicly announcing each family’s giving. The annual budget of the Mormon Church alone was half that of the Tongan government’s.

Their father, meanwhile, was becoming ever more eccentric with age. He’d issued a royal decree naming as “court jester” an American Buddhist who was also entrusted with managing the country’s trust fund. The jester gambled most of the fund on America’s unregulated “viatical industry”—buying the insurance policies of elderly or terminally ill patients, in hopes they’d die while the policy was still worth more than its cost—and promptly lost $20 million U.S., or more than half the annual budget of Tonga’s government.

All over the world in many cultures you’ll find gender non-conforming people – those who are traditionally third gender or gender-fluid or even agender. In some of these cultures, they are not only recognized, but also revered and honored, or treated as spiritual beings. In Hawaii, one can find the mahu, those who are biologically male or female, but having a gender identity between or encompassing both masculine and feminine, and whose social role is sacred. Some Native American people are two-spirit, while South Asia has their third gender called the hijra. Other cultures recognizing a third gender are Nigeria (yan daudu) , Samoa (fa’afafine), Thailand (kathoey), Mexico (muxe), and Tonga (fakaleiti). In yet other cultures, it is socially acceptable that some third genders are those who were assigned male, but live and behave as feminine and those who were born assigned female but live and behave as masculine.

But what was really surprising was how early the dates were: at 2,800 years before the present, they pushed the occupation of New Caledonia back to the end of the first millennium B.C. IN THE YEARS that followed, Lapita sites would be discovered on the Mussau Islands off Papua New Guinea, the Reef and Santa Cruz Islands, Tikopia Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Futuna, and Samoa—in other words, virtually everywhere between the Bismarck Archipelago and the western edge of Polynesia. Dates from these sites confirmed the age of the culture represented by these ceramics, but they also revealed an unexpected pattern: Lapita settlements across a 2,500-mile swath of the western Pacific—from roughly the Solomon Islands to Samoa—seem to have appeared almost simultaneously around 1000 B.C. Furthermore, east of the Solomons, they appeared to represent a cultural horizon: no one predated them in these islands, archaeologically speaking; no cultural artifacts underlay theirs.

Beyond the value of litigation in providing much-needed access to remedies for women who are discriminated against on the basis of sex, an Equal Rights Amendment will promote public understanding that all men and women are created free and equal in dignity and in rights, and should be treated as such. Historically women have been treated as second-class citizens, in the United States and around the world—economically, socially, and politically as well as legally. Increasingly, as the women’s movement has grown in strength, governments have recognized and tried to address this discrimination. Yet, to the surprise of many Americans, the United States is one of only seven countries in the world (along with Iran, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, and two small Pacific Island nations, Palau and Tonga) that have not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

Like birds that sowed the land with the seeds they ate, rickshaw and tonga-wallas spread the gossip they consumed. I made it a point not to feed them.

Funny thing about this world,” Adams said carefully. “Legally, a sovereign government can protect its interests pretty well as long as it doesn’t start open war and involve the big powers. Certainly a sovereign government can arm merchant ships and protect them against harassment by international gangsters. But there are a lot of sovereigns in name who haven’t the means to protect themselves and have to rely on someone else…” “You mean Tonga,” the prince said. He frowned, then shrugged. “But I must agree. We wish the British were still protecting us. But they’re not, and we see no one else we’d like to have as partners.” Adams nodded. “Now also in this world are big companies—like, say, Nuclear General—who have more than enough power to protect their interests but have no legal right to do it because they aren’t sovereign. The United States is supposed to look after our interests, but we don’t see them doing much of it. Delicate state of relations, world opinion—” Adams broke off, his jaw set. “Mostly lack of ability, of course. With welfare payments where they are the U.S. can’t even do proper research, much less—well. If Tonga were to nationalize some of Nuclear General’s ships, you’d have the right to arm them, declare them protected by your sovereignty…” “You’re asking us to expropriate your property?” Toki asked. “Well, we’d expect to be paid for it.” “But we don’t have the money to pay you… This is silly.” “You’d have enough money if you leased the ships to us. We’d pay very well for their use. At least as much, say, as we’d have to ask for if you nationalized them.” A slow grin spread across Toki’s bronze face.

One of the many command performances was delivered to the King of Tonga, a remarkably massive man of at least three hundred pounds. Mid-briefing, the king fell asleep and began snoring loudly. Admiral Hays gestured to the briefers to keep going. The rest of us remained quiet so as not to disturb the king’s slumber.

Before 1900, the traveller to Mussoorie took a tonga from Saharanpur to Dehradun,

The concept of Tongan Time is the Tongan version of mindfulness.

Tonga lies a few hundred miles from Samoa, at the western edge of the Polynesian Triangle. Together they constitute the western gateway to Polynesia; here are the oldest Polynesian languages, the longest settlement histories, the deepest Polynesian roots.

Without knowing it, he gradually became able to read nature. This is a good thing when living far into a forest. But many have either never learned it or they have forgotten it.