Tepper Quotes

“Never stop learning, and always be ready to teach yourself things you don’t know. The only things you will remember are things you care about.”

“All around the Mediterranean you'll find cultures that believe men can't control themselves and shouldn't have to try.”

“No sentimentality, no romance, no false hope, no self-petting lies, merely that which is!”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“[T]he scripture worshippers put the writings ahead of God. Instead of interpreting God's actions in nature, for example, they interpret nature in the light of the Scripture. Nature says the rock is billions of years old, but the book says different, so even though men wrote the book, and God made the rock and God gave us minds that have found ways to tell how old it is, we still choose to believe the Scripture.”

“Not many years before the Happening, one of your country's largest religious bodies officially declared that their book was holier than their God, thus simultaneously and corporately breaking several commandments of their own religion, particularly the first one. Of course they liked the book better! It was full of magic and contradictions that they could quote to reinforce their bigoted and hateful opinions, as I well know, for I chose many parts of it from among the scrolls and epistles that were lying around in caves here and there. They're correct that a god picked out the material; they just have the wrong god doing it.(The small god in Ch. 44)”

“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?”