Sheri S. Tepper Quotes

It's exactly the way we thought and acted. Men didn't have to be better! At least, not in terms of western thought, he didn't. He strutted and crowed and told himself just as he was, he was made in the image of God! It was easier to depend on heaven than be responsible on earth, but humans were divinely created so why worry."
"And you don't believe he was? Human?"
"He wasn't what I thought of as sapiens. In my opinion, very few of us were sapiens. Maybe none of us were. Maybe we'd had a chance of becoming sapiens, but we threw it away."
"When did mankind do that?"
"In Nela's time, I think. It was then that pitiful people who saw no reality and knew no science declared the holiness of reproduction. And while the liberals were preserving the right to beget, the reactionaries were preserving the faults in our gene pool. We could corrupt and destroy all the rest of creation, but our own germ plasm was sacred. It didn't matter that there were billions of us, but anything sapiens about us was far more threatened by our numbers than by any change we might make in ourselves.…"

This is not philosophy, this is reality. Will you please keep in mind what's going on!

Terminal conscientiousness,” he replied, his brow furrowed. “Scrupulousness of the kind that creates conditions making poverty and illness inevitable, then congratulates itself over feeding the poor and caring for the sick.

So I learned that people may be kind enough while not caring a rather.

Picture this: A mountain splintering the sky like a broken bone, its western precipice plummeting onto jumbled scree.

It went on, “If you accuse, then you must judge.”
“You let your accusers be your judges?” asked Peter, astounded.
“Who else should be satisfied?” it asked. “If one’s accusers cannot be satisfied, what is justice?”
“One’s accusers might be mad,” Peter suggested, very unwisely I thought, considering where we were. “Mad, and incapable of being satisfied.”

The difference between a true religion—and there are many which share aspects of truth—and a dangerous cult is only this: In the one the individual is freed to grow and live and learn; in the other the individual is subordinated to the will of a hierarchy, enslaved to the purposes of that hierarchy, forbidden to learn except what the cult would teach. You have only to look at the rules which govern the servants of a religion to know whether its god is God indeed, or devil!

All the questions had been reduced to doctrine; all the doctrine had been simplified to catechism; all the catechism had been learned long ago.

Think of that, Joziré! A court dedicated to pure justice, one that can overrule the law! They didn’t even have one of those back on old Earth!

That’s why they become prophets. Why would you want to be one, otherwise? Why would you want to scream your head off and threaten people with death and torture and Hell and make women cover themselves up unless you were hardwired for being crazy? The point is, if somebody’s hardwired and you’re not, the only thing he’ll let you be is a follower. If an ordinary person tries to talk to a hardwired person and be nice to him, it doesn’t do any good. It’s like being nice to a fruit-plucking machine. It’ll pluck out your eyes if you get in the way, no matter how fast you talk or how nice you are. Punishment doesn’t work, and talking to them won’t work, and arguing with them won’t work, any more than arguing with a plucking machine would work.

Despite Lutha’s undoubted intelligence, she was constantly exploding like fireworks, laughing or crying, passionate about every trifle. On Dinadh, we think of such behavior as typical of children, not serious adults.

The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers. I have always lived in a world in which I'm just a spot in history. My life is not the important point. I'm just part of the continuum, and that continuum, to me, is a marvelous thing. The history of life, and the history of the planet, should go on and on and on and on. I cannot conceive of anything in the universe that has more meaning than that.

Are those gods real?" I demanded.
"I am one of them, Gretamara. We exist, but we are not real in the sense that a tree is real or a rock is real. If all the people in the universe were gone, the rock or tree would still be there, but we deities exist only while our people do.

"How is that possible?"
"To a Wizard, anything is possible," the Dervish said with more than a hint of scorn. "Or so they lead themselves to believe."

Afar, Legless God Orimar Breaze howled rage and resentment of this nonsense. There were only two classes of beings: adorers or persecutors.