# Quote — Sheri S. Tepper, Sideshow

> “I was a free person.”
>
> “Free to what?”
>
> “To…to do anything I wanted to.”
>
> Jory laughed, shaking her head. “Weren’t you told as a child that one way was better than another, one belief better than another? Weren’t you told some things were higher and some lower? That some things were suitable for women, others for men? That your God was more powerful? That your religion was truer? That your language was more expressive? That your customs had more heart, or more soul? That your cooking tasted better? That your way of child-rearing was preferable? That all your ways were so much better than others ways that you would die to keep yours as they were, or die to destroy others if they seemed threatening? Weren’t you taught not to change, not to adapt, not to become anything different? Weren’t you taught the word ‘loyalty’? The word ‘tradition’? Didn’t they tell you that animals were higher than vegetables, mammals were higher than other animals, man was higher than other mammals, and your kind of man was higher than other men?
>
> “You think you weren’t enslaved by that? You think you had freedom of choice? I have said this to Fringe, I say it to you: A man’s choice becomes his son’s duty and his grandson’s tradition! Thus men assure enslavement of their progeny.”

- Author: [Sheri S. Tepper](https://www.leafyquotes.com/sheri-s-tepper.md)
- Book: [Sideshow](https://www.leafyquotes.com/sheri-s-tepper/sideshow.md)
- Page: 419
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sheri_S._Tepper#Sideshow_(1992)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/sheri-s-tepper/sideshow/i-was-a-free

## More from this book

> Think of how much time and effort it would have saved if we’d only known what man’s destiny actually was. Think of our time, all the fundamentalist fascists versus the civil libertines; all the liberals throwing our money at the poor versus the conservatives throwing our money at themselves; all the male versus female controversies, all the revolutions, sexual, political, and economic. How marvelous if we’d only known what was important and what wasn’t!

p. 360 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/sheri-s-tepper/sideshow/think-of-how.md)

> Oh, I know what you Enforcers think about the council, Ertigon. We’d have to be complete fools not to know. You take us for pompous idiots, mostly, layabouts who spend our days eating and drinking and engaging in our effete little rituals, none of which mean anything, accomplish anything. You’re perfectly right, that’s what we are. But then, that’s what we were assigned to do. That’s what we’re here for. It’s what all public servants have always been: roadblocks, resistors, interceptors of change, valves designed to shut down the flow of events, inhibitors of revolution, delayers of evolution, servants of the status quo.

p. 249 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/sheri-s-tepper/sideshow/oh-i-know.md)

> Jory continued in a lecturer’s tone. “Old women like us, Cafferty, are left here to die. It would not be fitting for them to die where men who don’t own them might look upon them—and of course their owners don’t want to look at them—so they die here, where none see them. The religion of Thrasis prohibits murder. They are merely given no food or water and left to the mercy of the Thrasian God.”

p. 332 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/sheri-s-tepper/sideshow/jory-continued-in-a-lecturers.md)