Octavia Butler - People Quotes

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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.

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
In countries where there are no racial differences or no religious differences, people find other reasons to set aside one certain group of people and generally spit in their direction.

Octavia Butler
When I meet a woman who attracts me, I prefer women,' she said. 'And when I meet a man who attracts me, I prefer men.' 'You mean you haven't made up your mind yet.' 'I mean exactly what I said. I told you you wouldn't like it. Most people who ask want me definitely on one side or the other.

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

Octavia Butler
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.

Octavia Butler
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.

Octavia Butler
Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.

Octavia Butler
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.

Octavia Butler
People who want to write either do it or they don't. At last I began to say that my most important talent - or habit - was persistence. Without it, I would have given up writing long before I finished my first novel. It's amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up.

Octavia Butler
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.

Octavia Butler
If you don't care about my people, why should I care about yours?

Octavia Butler
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!

Octavia Butler
When I began writing science fiction, when I began reading, heck, I wasn't in any of this stuff I read. I certainly wasn't in the science fiction. The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn't manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing.

Octavia Butler
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.

Octavia Butler
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.

Octavia Butler
Drowning people
Sometimes die
Fighting their rescuers.

Octavia Butler
We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that's the way things are. That's the way things always have been.

Octavia Butler
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.

Octavia Butler
The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one's own place, One's own people, One's own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even Loving and loved. Yet every child Is cast from paradise- Into growth and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change.

Octavia Butler