Sheri S. Tepper Quotes

Here we are after a couple million years of natural selection has produced a race that overpopulates and makes war and dominates and rapes, and you want to know about wisdom! Natural selection doesn’t select for wisdom!

As the Gauphin taught, people are ridiculous! We have language and history, we have technology and philosophy, and we still have not achieved good sense and self-control!

The sooner we can separate salvageable skeptics from self-righteous absolutists, the sooner we can move along.

Madame says when we focus on our anger, our vision begins to constrict. Soon we are caught up in fury, and we turn it upon everyone.

She needed more sleep and less aggravation.

Despite his concern, he was not so out of control as to forget that a frantic man is a careless man, a lesson every soldier learns soon or dies wishing he had learned sooner.

One of the difficulties of being the good guys is that even open societies have to have secret police, and secret police turn toward repression as a compass points north.

Rich people didn't get in that kind of mess. They never had. Only the poor got trapped: by ignorance, by religion, by self-righteous laws passed by people who broke them with impunity.

They parade their cruelty openly, calling it diplomacy, calling it expediency, as governments always have.

You don’t remember your first ancestors. You have no memory of ninety-nine percent of what makes you what you are! Instead you have comfy baby-stories you tell yourselves to explain why you’re not good people. What sin you committed or how you didn’t do with this god or that god told you. Instead of learning how not to be bad, you learn how to be forgiven and carried off to heaven. Most of you find it easier to believe the baby-stories than to learn from history and science, because it takes brains and hard study to understand history and science, but the stories are simple and comfy. People who want things easy and comfy resent people who study things. They teach their children the comfy stories and tell them not to worry about studying, just buy a ticket to go to heaven, and gradually, everyone becomes as ignorant as everyone else. It’s happened time after time on Earth.

“Not hunting today, sir?” asked Tony in his most innocent voice, busy putting two and two together but not sure how he felt about the resultant sum.

Useless as a third leg on a goose.

Prey, property, or opponent, gasped Mouche, who was now in the door they had entered through, breathing the cleaner air of the sneakway. Madame said that's how gangs think."
Questioner nodded. "One like this was a gang unto herself. So long as we think of such people as humans and attempt to treat them as humans, we cannot protect the innocent.

An itchy man is prey to discontent; he'll suage his flea bites with the blood of kings."
Surely the common man wouldn't want that!"
"What common men want most is beer and sex, without disturbances.

People don’t seem to rob bookstores much, more’s the pity for them.