Sheri S. Tepper quotes - page 3

She needed more sleep and less aggravation. (Sheri S. Tepper)
We believe that nothing worthy of our worship would want our worship. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
The boys attend the Institute. I saw where they keep the girls. They are not taught anything. They are merely fed, bathed, given exercise, raised so until puberty, at which time they are culled. The enemy does not want either rebellion or thought bred into his followers, so any who show signs of independence or unusual intelligence are culled. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
"When your people began to press upon us, long, long ago, we moved into remote enclaves. To us, numbers are not strength; wisdom is strength. What profiteth a race to be numerous and stupid, la? Behold how great we are, saith the lemming!” She laughed. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
He did a lot of disputation and he always raised his voice when his logic was weak. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
Duty was simply not enough. There had to be more than that! View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
He calls it the university of the Real One, and it teaches only things that are known to be true, which means it is largely devoted to mathematics and sciences. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
I mentioned that the small god said she brought the asteroid because of what man had become, and they retorted that man might not have become that if we had been relentless in our education of our young people and had not perpetuated ignorance under the guise of cultural sensitivity and the politically correct. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
Your leaders worshipped the greed devil when they sold their votes and influence to spread bad stuff; they worshipped the power devil when they valued votes over the health of the planet; they made a pretence of mercy and justice by advocating human rights while they sucked up to dominance devils whose law was torture and whose rule was the enslavement of women. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
Aside from earning their livings, what did your people do, mostly? Games. Sports. Casinos. Loud machines that went fast. Shopping. Lawsuits blaming other for whatever went wrong. What did they believe in? Conspiracy theories. Racial superiority. Heroes with superpowers. Faith healers. God-loves-you religions. State-supported lotteries. All that enormous energy expended to conquer nothing at all, stadia full of people watching no conquering going on. For every scientist or person in government who really tried to conquer, there were a thousand people buying lottery tickets, drinking beer, watching football, and growing old. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
Each race creates its own devils. You had so many that they specialized. Devils of racial hatred, devils of greed and violence. Devils who killed their own people in orgies of blood. Devils who bombed clinics, devils who bombed school buses, devils who bombed other devils. I got to know every one of them by name. As soon as I arrived, I sent my monsters out to kill them all. They had tarnished my reputation, and though I have lavished much care on mankind, vengeance is mine. (Sheri S. Tepper)
Once the Regime said that one living cell is a life, real living became irrelevant. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
If a society thinks it needs weapons, it must accept killing. If it thinks it needs violent men, it must accept rapine and assault. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
Call me either Colonel or Doctor. Hearing both titles gives me a split personality, the two philosophies differing so widely. It is medicine's philosophy that lives should be saved, of all sorts. It is our military's philosophy that as long as a few cells are kept alive, actual lives may be dispensed with. A few inches of gut in a bottle is not, to my mind, a life, no matter what theological contortions one puts oneself through. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
She had grown through loss and confusion into a girl who lived almost entirely inside her head, taking refuge in the places she created there, not so much repulsed by others' reality as unable to perceive it. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
Being an immortal doesn't matter to me. If one looks out into the universe and perceives what true immortality would mean in terms of time and space, it takes monstrous hubris to even conceive of personal immortality, much less desire it. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
I am myself, though from moment to moment something else seems to be looking on. Whatever will be required of me, however, can best be done if I remember who I am. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
Long ago, the people of the world cried out for help. In the reaches of heaven their cry was heard, and a Visitor came in answer to it. The Visitor began helping immediately, but secretly. Now the visitor intends to be known to the people of the world and the people of the world must deal with that knowledge. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
Many men of importance were gathered there to be seen talking with other men of importance, resulting in an abundance of conspicuous but immaterial discourse. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
My grandfather said people who can learn, learn morality the way they learn everything else, by building on history. He also said that some people cannot learn from history, so they cannot change. For them, there's only one book or tradition or whatever it's called in their religion, and in that book God is eternal and whatever the book says God commanded two or three or four thousand years ago, God still commands today. That may be kill homosexuals or kill nonbelievers. It may say enslave your enemies. It may say mutilate or sequester women, or sell your ten-year-old daughter for somebody's third wife. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
We would prefer to believe them, and we've gone along with them when they've told us the predators are a separate people, races that eat other intelligent life and who do not, therefore, eat Republicans. Or newsmen. (Sheri S. Tepper)
The world had been repeatedly swept by war and famine and plague when the population had been a quarter of what it was now! Less than a hundred years ago. Sparse population didn't equal peace. It never had. All it meant were fewer casualties. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
It is far more important to establish a civil and orderly society than it is to pander to abusive cultural and religious artifacts. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
He thinks he's a liberal, he's generally on our side, but he's also ex-military, and he falls for the national security gambit every time someone plays it. Star Wars. Stealth anything. Talk about burning the flag and he gets all choked up. Funny, so many of these guys think the country stands for the flag instead of the other way around. So long as Old Glory's whipping in the breeze, it's okay to deal guns to kids and cheat on your taxes. View quote
Sheri S. Tepper
Military men! Damn it, they always thought in terms of hardware, black or white, our side or the other side. It was damned hard to get them to see gray at all, and getting them to tell dark gray from medium gray was impossible! View quote
Sheri S. Tepper