Sheri S. Tepper

Quotes

1. Some professor of history wrote that cultures define their gods when they’re young and primitive, when their main concern is survival. They endow their gods with survival characteristics like omnipotence and authoritarianism, belligerence and suspicion, and that’s what goes into all their myths or scriptures. Then, if they survive long enough, they begin to develop morality. They examine their own history, and they learn that authoritarianism doesn’t accord with free will, that belligerence and suspicion are unhealthful, but this newly moral culture is stuck with its bigoted, interfering gods, plus it’s stuck with people who prefer the old bloody gods and use them as their justification for doing all kinds of awful things.

   p. 102

2. 

   It is far more important to establish a civil and orderly society than it is to pander to abusive cultural and religious artifacts.

   p. 293

3. 

   You reacted to stop the Mahahmbi killing your women, but you did nothing about their killing other women. It’s clear you could have done something. You are numerous enough that you could have killed the Mahahmbi who came out into the desert to perform those rituals!

   p. 391

4. 

   “I dreamed this,” he said in a helpless voice. “I dreamed this!”

   “Well, Mouche,” said Questioner in a chilly, admonitory voice, “I am sure you believe so. It is all very mystic and dreamlike, and though I can be sensitivity to the moods and impressions such places evoke, I try not to give way to them. When dream is most attractive, then is time to be alert and practical, for it is then that we are most in danger.”

   p. 367

5. 

   Seed on wind and being adaptable. Same as me, Ellin. Same as everybody. All of us, seeds. Seed is ninety percent precursor mammal, like mouse. Seven or eight percent chimpanzee-human primate precursor. One point nine nine nine percent generalized Homo sapiens. Tiny fraction one percent me, or you, different from everybody else. One healthy creature being able to blow on wind and still live! Able to choose.

   p. 168

6. 

   “All societies maintain themselves by forcing personal behavior into a mold or pattern which the society calls its ‘culture.’ The patterns are imposed by natural or political conditions; for example, either recurrent drought or recurrent persecution can result in similar patterns. Most patterns require changes in behavior, and that requires changes in belief systems, or vice versa, sort of chicken and egg as to which comes first.

   “So a few thousand years go by and the climate changes, or the politics, but the people still follow the same taboos because by now they believe their deity ordered them to do it. Long-practiced behaviors that started as a response to conditions, always fossilize into ‘traditional values,’ that is, the only ‘right way’ to do things. At that point people no longer use the system in order to survive, the system uses them in order to survive. That’s something people often don’t understand. Systems are parasitical, they have a life of their own, and they, too, evolve and change and try to survive. The one factor that is true of all cultures, without exception, is that it never represents the free desires of the people who are jammed into it even when people are conditioned from childhood to accept uniformation.”

   “Really?” asked Ellin. “Never?”

   Questioner grinned at her. “Only mavericks live in accordance with their desires, and even they don’t often get away with it. They are usually labeled as troublemakers and gotten rid of.”

   p. 286

7. 

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

   p. 478

8. 

   Any mankind person worth his salt can simultaneously incubate whole clutches of ideas that are either contradictory or mutually exclusive. For instance, mankind has persuaded itself that its race is perfectible, though it hasn’t changed physically, mentally, or psychologically since the Cro-Magnon. Mankind has also persuaded itself that each individual is unique, though each person shares ninety-nine and ninety-nine one hundredths of his DNA and roughly the same percentage of his ideas with thousands or even millions of other persons.

   p. 216

9. 

   “Persons inside the group are ‘us.’ All significant entities outside the group, including females, are ‘them,’ and all of them are either property, prey, or opponents.”

   p. 100

10. 

    Even our earliest espousers of human rights limit them to life, liberty, and the pursuit of satisfactions. They do not guarantee posterity or immortality.

    p. 487

11. 

    “Punishment is not my business,” said Questioner. “As I have said to others, it never works anyhow. Putting right is my business.

    Unfortunately, when things are put right, often the innocent suffer with the guilty.”

    p. 487

12. 

    “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.”

    p. 317