Sheri S. Tepper: Trending quotes

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Sheri S. Tepper: 300 quotes0 likes

“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.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 43, p. 322

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

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 41, p. 293

“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.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 39, p. 283

“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!”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 12, p. 125

“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

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 9, pp. 102-103

“If a person torturing and killing people is evil, why are gods who torture and kill people called good?”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 9, p. 102

“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.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 5, p. 57

“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!”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 2, p. 8

“Words? Not really. Mankind is a good word.”

Sheri S. Tepper

She set down her glass with a thump. “Or humankind. I’m afraid we’ve spent a lot of feminist energy on meaningless symbols rather than essential functions.”
Source: Gibbon's Decline & Fall (1996), Chapter 10, p. 170

“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.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Colonel Doctor Jens Ladislav in Ch. 33 : dezmai of the drums, p. 294
The Visitor (2002)

“Personal beliefs are unarguable, even if the other side has all the facts.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Nell Latimer in Ch. 6 : nell latimer’s book, p. 51
The Visitor (2002)

“The practice of diplomacy, I have found, is sometimes like eating soup with a fork: much activity yielding little nourishment.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 46, p. 358

“We always assume that living, breathing, sensible creatures want peace.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 29, p. 217

“The lustful who punish beauty would be wiser to control lust.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 24, p. 181

“Don’t you find that predators are those who most often assert absolute rights to personal freedoms?”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 23, p. 170

“When agony is not present, no matter how imminent it looms, painful change must come from outside. This is a truth.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 20, p. 157

“People don’t seem to rob bookstores much, more’s the pity for them.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 8, p. 88

“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!”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: Singer from the Sea (1999), Chapter 24, “People from the Sea” (p. 382)

“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.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: Singer from the Sea (1999), Chapter 24, “People from the Sea” (p. 382)

“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.”

Sheri S. Tepper

Source: Singer from the Sea (1999), Chapter 23, “The Marae Morehu” (p. 370)