# Quote — Sheri S. Tepper, Sideshow

> “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.…”

- Author: [Sheri S. Tepper](https://www.leafyquotes.com/sheri-s-tepper.md)
- Book: [Sideshow](https://www.leafyquotes.com/sheri-s-tepper/sideshow.md)
- Page: 324
- 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/its-exactly-the

## 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)