Top 53 Sheri S. Tepper Quotes
#1. Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality.
Sheri S. Tepper
#2. I tell you, lad, that men will believe is one says, "The Gods say ... " They will believe if one says, "I had a Vision ... " They will believe if one says, "It was told me on a tablet of hidden gold ... " But, if one says, "History teaches," then they will not believe.
Sheri S. Tepper
#3. It's not what your reproductive organs do that counts, it's what your mind intends before that moment.
Sheri S. Tepper
#4. They will set aside what they have believed about the world, divesting themselves of all preconceptions, all judgments ... They will do it, then they will send their minds out to seek the truth.
Sheri S. Tepper
#5. I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that inevitably will be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay.
Sheri S. Tepper
#6. The only difference between a futile madman and an effective tyrant is power and will.
Sheri S. Tepper
#7. if a being has sufficient sense of justice and civility to know it has done wrong, knowing it has done wrong is often sufficient punishment. If the being has no remorse, punishment will only increase its anger.
Sheri S. Tepper
#8. Stavia saw herself as in a picture, from the outside, a darkly cloaked figure moving along a cobbled street, the stones sheened with a soft, early spring rain.
Sheri S. Tepper
#9. To me, fantasy has always been the genre of escape, science fiction the genre of ideas. So if you can escape and have a little idea as well, maybe you have some kind of a cross-breed between the two.
Sheri S. Tepper
#10. He told us that nations of men fell into disorder, so nations of law were set up instead. He told us that nations of law then forgot justice and let the law become a Game, a Game in which the moves and the winning were more important than truth. He told us to seek justice rather than the Game.
Sheri S. Tepper
#11. Men like to think well of themselves, and poets help them do it.
Sheri S. Tepper
#12. Whoever declares another heretic is himself a devil. Whoever places a relic or artifact above justice, kindness, mercy, or truth is himself a devil and the thing elevated is a work of evil magic.
Sheri S. Tepper
#13. What do I have to say to the universe? A soul ought to have something to say to the universe if it's going to be immortal.
Sheri S. Tepper
#14. Power is power as the sun is the sun, the wind is the wind. The villager blesses the rain as it falls on his crops; the pillager uses it to cover his approach. It is the wielder who determines the good or evil.
Sheri S. Tepper
#15. As vocabulary is reduced , so are the number of feelings you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of the things you can identify! Not only understanding is limited, but also experience. Man grows by language. Whenever he limits language he retrogresses!
Sheri S. Tepper
#16. 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.
Sheri S. Tepper
#17. When a response is detected, the thing that uttered moves separately but implacably toward its responder, as by gravity. So equivalence is drawn to equivalence until they are within touching distance.
Sheri S. Tepper
#18. Recent history takes a while to set. People really don't know what just happened. They only figure it out later.
Sheri S. Tepper
#19. Boys play with death as though it were a game, cutting their teeth on daggers.
Sheri S. Tepper
#20. It may be important to write a book that doesn't come up to what I would like to have rather than to write no book at all.
Sheri S. Tepper
#21. To the Chasmites, truth is determined by how well it fits their expectations, and doesn't that sound familiar? ... They have consistently refused to have a god contest, and I fear they will have to encounter the godlet rather forcibly before they believe there is anything there at all.
Sheri S. Tepper
#22. Preferring actual ignorance to the appearance of it, he did not ask.
Sheri S. Tepper
#23. Mankind accepts good fortune as his due, but when bad occurs, he thinks it was aimed at him, done to him, a hex, a curse, a punishment by his deity for some transgression, as though his god were a petty storekeeper, counting up the day's receipts.
Sheri S. Tepper
#24. One listened and one remembered. I listened as best I could, but there were no hooks in my head to hang much of it on.
Sheri S. Tepper
#25. The sooner we can separate salvageable skeptics from self-righteous absolutists, the sooner we can move along.
Sheri S. Tepper
#26. Once we're grown, all we can hear are what the poet described: the echoes, dying.
Sheri S. Tepper
#27. The practice of diplomacy, I have found, is sometimes like eating soup with a fork: much activity yielding little nourishment.
Sheri S. Tepper
#29. The sidesaddle was designed to protect a maiden's virginity, while risking the maiden's neck. Rather much for rather little, I thought.
Sheri S. Tepper
#30. Only fools insist upon life at any cost ... Others would say that life may be laid down when it becomes too heavy. Where does it go, after all, but into the keeping of the Powers who gave it and will give it once again?
Sheri S. Tepper
#31. And in the end, unable to feel terror, mankind will go, we will all go down, down, down to happyland.
Sheri S. Tepper
#33. The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.
Sheri S. Tepper
#34. No sentimentality, no romance, no false hope, no self-petting lies, merely that which is!
Sheri S. Tepper
#35. along a cobbled street, the stones sheened with a soft, early spring rain. On either side the gutters ran with an infant chuckle and gurgle, baby streams being amused with themselves. The
Sheri S. Tepper
#36. In that look was such love and uncritical adoration as a god might instill into a new create. "Except, how boring at last," he thought. "To have one always, always adoring one. But perhaps gods do not get bored ...
Sheri S. Tepper
#37. A bird cried jubilation. In that moment they lived long. All minor motions were stilled and only the great ones were perceived. Beneath them the earth turned, singing.
Sheri S. Tepper
#38. They make a mess," Jared told her. "Tulip foliage dies and turns an ugly yellow. Pansies aren't hardy. The bloom stalks on lavender drop their buds. Violets seed themselves." His tone of voice made it clear that seeding oneself was a perversion.
Sheri S. Tepper
#39. If the law does not do justice, the people will mock the law. Vess
Sheri S. Tepper
#40. Bao is the acceptance that mankind is part of the fabric of the universe, not the purpose of it. Humanity is meant to live as part of creation, not as the owner of it or to make war against it.
Sheri S. Tepper
#41. Perhaps it is meant to be hard. Perhaps there are some things so previous that one can only be tested when one is asked to give them up.
Sheri S. Tepper
#42. In secrecy, in silence, a whole race may be destroyed without notice. Whole cultures and species have been destroyed while men smiled and spoke of economics, of employment, of progress, of the welfare of mankind. Is a threat less deadly because it does not scream and rage and threaten force of arms?
Sheri S. Tepper
#43. There is nothing so delightful, so pure, so innocent or enjoyable that some group has not forbidden it.
Sheri S. Tepper
#44. All around the Mediterranean you'll find cultures that believe men can't control themselves and shouldn't have to try.
Sheri S. Tepper
#45. It has a quality other countries call cultural imperialism, which, we have found, means a tasty culture that other peoples readily enjoy, an infective culture, if you will, from which ideas and usages spread quickly.
Sheri S. Tepper
#46. Often we wish to be exorcised of demons we ourselves have allowed house room.
Sheri S. Tepper
#47. There are writers who say they have no social responsibility except to write a good book, but that doesn't satisfy me.
Sheri S. Tepper
#48. We live in a time like dreaming ... The edges of our lives flutter and change as we watch them. Listen to the dream.
Sheri S. Tepper
#49. I'm not sure a world run by women would be any better. They're human beings!
Sheri S. Tepper
#50. No aristocrat would sit in the wild grass to dream. Aristocrats have gardens for that, if they dream at all.
Sheri S. Tepper
#51. Only mavericks live in accordance with their desires, and even they don't often get away with it. They are usually labeled as troublemakers and gotten rid of.
Sheri S. Tepper
#52. We'll tell him his mother waits for him in heaven, I suppose."
"Is that a lie?"
"It's what we tell fools and children." She sighed. "Postulating a heaven gives man an out for having been unable to retain the paradise he was given here on earth.
Sheri S. Tepper
#53. Creation has the truth written all over it - the age of the universe, the history of the world - but nine-tenths of mankind either don't know it or think it's a sham, because it isn't what their book or their prophet says, and it isn't cozy or manipulable enough.
Sheri S. Tepper
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