Octavia Butler - Human Quotes

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Human beings fear difference, Lilith had told him once. Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialization. If you don't understand this, you will. You'll probably find both tendencies surfacing in your own behavior. And she had put her hand on his hair. When you feel a conflict, try to go the Oankali way. Embrace difference.

Octavia Butler
We are a naturally hierarchical species. When I say these things in my novels, sure I make up the aliens and all of that, but I don't make up the essential human character, the way we are.

Octavia Butler
Yori, Human purpose isn't what you say it is or what I say it is. It's what your biology says it is—what your genes say it is.

Octavia Butler
I might not have believed this if a Human had said it. Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everybody had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant.

Octavia Butler
I'm not pessimistic about much of anything. No, I'm hopeful. The only problem that we human beings really suffer from, and this is important to us as a species, is that we tend to do the right thing when we get scared.

Octavia Butler
Humans were genetically inclined to be intolerant of difference. They could overcome the inclination, but it was a reality of the Human conflict that they often did not.

Octavia Butler
Nothing. It just finds you a lot more attractive than it does most Humans. What can you do with a beautiful woman that you can't do with an ugly one? Nothing. It's just a matter of preference.

Octavia Butler
We human beings make a lot of the same mistakes over and over again. It doesn't seem to help. I'm alarmed at how easy it is, for instance, to railroad people into acting against their own best interest.

Octavia Butler
You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all... That was like ignoring cancer.

Octavia Butler
The differences you perceive between Humans-between groups of Humans-are the result of isolation and inbreeding, mutation, and adaptation to different Earth environments

Octavia Butler