Sheri S. Tepper citations (150 citations, Page 4)

“If a society thinks it needs weapons, it must accept killing. If it thinks it needs violent men, it must accept rapine and assault.”

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Sheri S. Tepper

Colonel Doctor Jens Ladislav in Ch. 32 : dismé in hold, p. 283
The Visitor (2002)

“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.”

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Colonel Doctor Jens Ladislav in Ch. 30 : dismé and the doctor, p. 256
The Visitor (2002)

“They were always telling me their way is the only way to go!”

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“Oh, no, my dear. No, not at all. So long as it harms no one else, one’s own way is always preferable.”

Dismé and Arnole in Ch. 7 : dismé the maiden, p. 59
The Visitor (2002)

“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.”

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Source: The Visitor (2002), Ch. 7 : dismé the maiden, p. 57

“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.”

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

“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.”

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Guardian Camwar in Ch. 4 : the cooper, pp. 42-43
The Visitor (2002)

“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.”

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Guardian Camwar in Ch. 4 : the cooper, p. 41
The Visitor (2002)

“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.”

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Source: The Visitor (2002), Ch. 4 : the cooper, p. 40

“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.”

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Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 49, p. 391

“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.”

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Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 44, pp. 335-336

“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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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!”

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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.”

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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?”

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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.”

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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!”

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

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

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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