Octavia E. Butler Quotes

Are you Earthseed?
Do you believe?
Belief will not save you.
Only actions
Guided and shaped
By belief and knowledge
Will save you.
Belief
Initiates and guides action—
Or it does nothing.

All religions are ultimately cargo cults.
Adherents perform required rituals, follow
specific rules, and expect to be supernaturally
gifted with desired rewards—long life,
honor, wisdom, children, good health, wealth,
victory over opponents, immortality after
death, any desired rewards.

If you hear nonsense like that often enough for long enough, you begin to believe it.

We were snatched away and given alone into the hands of people who believed that it was their duty to break us and remake us in the Christian American image. And, of course, breaking people is much easier than putting them together again.
So much agony caused, so much evil done in God’s name.

Now I have been raped.
It happened twice. Once on Monday, and again yesterday. It is my Christmas gift from Christian America.

When vision fails
Direction is lost. When direction is lost
Purpose may be forgotten. When purpose if forgotten
Emotion rules alone. When emotion rules alone,
Destruction...destruction.

Beware:
Ignorance
Protects itself
Ignorance
Promotes suspicion.
Suspicion
Engenders fear.
Fear quails,
Irrational and blind,
Or fear looms,
Defiant and closed.
Blind, closed,
Suspicious, afraid,
Ignorance
Protects itself,
And protected,
Ignorance grows.

Life is getting better, but that won’t stop a war if politicians and business people decide it’s to their advantage to have one.

Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III. In fact, there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox. These were stupid affairs—wastes of life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious foreign enemies. All too often, they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.
Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major, nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself.

We give our dead
To the orchards
And the groves.
We give our dead
To life.

Consider—
We are born
Not with purpose,
But with potential.

You're truly free for the first time. What could be more difficult than that?

Don't you know everything?"
God smiled. "No, I outgrew that trick long ago. You can't imagine how boring it was.

They can create something beautiful, useful, even something worthless. But they create. They don't destroy.

Who knows what we humans have that others might be willing to take in trade for a livable space on a world not our own.