Parable of the Sower

The Destiny of Earthseed

Is to take root among the stars.

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

Freedom is dangerous, Cory, but it’s precious, too. You can’t just throw it away or let it slip away. You can’t sell it for bread and pottage.

I wonder what a badge is, other than a license to steal.

People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back’

It’s better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them.

If everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture?

A tree

Cannot grow

In its parents’ shadows.

Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying.

All struggles

Are essentially

Power struggles.

Who will rule,

Who will lead,

Who will define,

refine,

confine,

design,

Who will dominate.

All struggles

Are essentially

Power struggles,

And most

are no more intellectual

than two rams

knocking their heads together.

I realize I don’t know very much. None of us knows very much. But we can all learn more. Then we can teach one another. We can stop denying reality or hoping it will go away by magic.

You tend to resent people you’re afraid of.

A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of superperson. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of.

“From what I’ve read,” I said to him, “the world goes crazy every three or four decades. The trick is to survive until it goes sane again.”

A victim of God may,

Through learning adaption,

Become a partner of God,

A victim of God may,

Through forethought and planning,

Become a shaper of God.

Or a victim of God may,

Through shortsightedness and fear,

Remain God’s victim,

God’s plaything,

God’s prey.

The only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it

People here in the neighborhood are saying she had no business going to Mars, anyway. All that money wasted on another crazy space trip when so many people here on earth can’t afford water, food, or shelter

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.

“Your God doesn’t care about you at all,” Travis said.

“All the more reason to care about myself and others.”

Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn’t vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach.

Sometimes I write to keep from going crazy. There’s a world of things I don’t feel free to talk to anyone about.

“When it comes to strangers with guns,” I told her, “I think suspicion is more likely to keep you alive than trust.”

There’s no narcotic like exhaustion.