Sheri S. Tepper quotes - page 4

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. (Sheri S. Tepper)
If a person torturing and killing people is evil, why are gods who torture and kill people called good? View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
One of the strangest things I have encountered on your world, dear Benita, is that many of your people have no idea who they really are but many ridiculous ideas about what they are expected to be, plus many religious convictions about what they should be, although nobody is! One should not want to be anything but what one is because it creates unhappiness. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
Thinking it over later, she blamed TV and the movies for her immediate reaction. The media gobbled everything that happened or could happen, then spit it out, over and over, every idea regurgitated, every concept so mushed up that when anything remarkable actually occurred it was already a cliché. Like cloning or surrogate mothers or extraterrestrials and UFOs. The whole world had heard about it and seen movies about it, and had become bored with the subject before it even happened! View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
I suspect there's little difference between whim and inspiration at the beginning of any chain of events. It's what happens later that tells us which is which. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
Personal beliefs are unarguable, even if the other side has all the facts. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
We always assume that living, breathing, sensible creatures want peace. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
The lustful who punish beauty would be wiser to control lust. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
Don't you find that predators are those who most often assert absolute rights to personal freedoms? View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
When agony is not present, no matter how imminent it looms, painful change must come from outside. This is a truth. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
People don't seem to rob bookstores much, more's the pity for them. (Sheri S. Tepper)
No one ever has to believe! The universe is, it does not require belief. Do you think it will stop existing if you do not believe? Do you think far galaxies will harbor resentment against you if you do not believe? Do you resent the ant who does not look up and admire you? Never! View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
You felt something huge and marvelous of which you are part, and in the moments you described, you forgot yourself for you were one with your world and with the sky above it, and even the stars looking down. There is nothing larger or more wonderful than that. Still, there are those who would prefer self. They will accept any belief, no matter how foolish, if it guarantees them personal immortality. I know people like that. But there are others who know themselves well enough to realize how limiting that is. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
I know you want me to believe all this, but it seems little different from the religious stories we learned in school, esoteric and relatively pointless. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
What was scheduled had no connection with what actually happened. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
An intelligent woman herself, the Duchess had overestimated the Marshal's intelligence. Not an ambitious woman, she had underestimated his ambition. So are many misread by other's lights. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
Old gods sometimes do that in their retirement. They become galactic social workers, self-appointed do-gooders. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
Human worlds are always awash in superstition, only a stubborn elite proof against it. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
Earth had always operated on a continuous-growth model that requires a poverty class. Sustainable models require productive work by all members and are quite different. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
They learn nothing, for they're convinced they know everything that matters. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
The use of destructive, noisy machinery for recreational purposes must become anathema to humans, as unthinkable as eating one's young. (Sheri S. Tepper)
The only thing rarer than louts who think is louts who read. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
What kind of a universe would it be if we could not do small kindnesses for one another? View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
Disillusionment, pain, unpleasant surprise, all were part of growing up. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
I have often wondered why anger is considered by some Western religions to be a sin. It is such a marvelous protection against evil. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper