Octavia E. Butler: Quotes about people

““I didn’t want to scare you. We don’t want to scare anyone.”
“No? Well, sometimes it’s a good thing to scare people. Sometimes fear is all that will keep them from doing stupid things.””

“We’ve also been laughed at, argued with, booed, and threatened with hellfire—or gunfire. But Jarret’s kind of religion and Jarret himself are getting less and less popular these days. Both, it seems, are bad for business, bad for the U. S. Constitution, and bad for a large percentage of the population. They always have been, but now more and more people are willing to say so in public. The Crusaders have terrorized some people into silence, but they’ve just made others very angry.”

“No one thought about what kind of society we were building with such stupid decisions. People who could afford to educate their children in private schools were glad to see the government finally stop wasting their tax money, educating other people’s children. They seemed to think they lived on Mars. They imagined that a country filled with poor, uneducated, unemployable people somehow wouldn’t hurt them!”

“So he had locked her in the closet. Some of his people, ignorant and fearful, could not quite believe her illness was not contagious. Badger locked her away from them for her own safety. She had seen for herself how eager they were to get her out of their sight.”

“People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.”

“Drowning people
Sometimes die
Fighting their rescuers.”

“Beware
At war
Or at peace,
More people die
Of unenlightened self-interest
Than of any other disease”

“Better to stay alive," I said. "At least while there's a chance to get free." I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.”

“In my years, I have seen that people must be their own gods and make their own good fortune. The bad will come or not come anyway.”

“Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.”

““I’m not a demagogue.”
“That’s too bad. That leaves the field to people who are demagogues—to the Jarrets of the world. And there have always been Jarrets. Probably there always will be.””

“Life is getting better, but that won’t stop a war if politicians and business people decide it’s to their advantage to have one.”

“If you don’t care about my people, why should I care about yours?”

“Lilith might be strong enough now to handle troublemakers herself, but she did not want to do that unless she had to. It would not help the people become a community, and if they could not unite, nothing else they did would matter.”

“Short-lived people, people who could die, did not know what enemies loneliness and boredom could be.”

“We were snatched away and given alone into the hands of people who believed that it was their duty to break us and remake us in the Christian American image. And, of course, breaking people is much easier than putting them together again.
So much agony caused, so much evil done in God’s name.”

“A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of superperson. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of.”

“You tend to resent people you’re afraid of.”

“It’s better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them.”