339 Quotes by Octavia E. Butler

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery. I.

That’s what Humans are, too, don’t forget. People who poison each other, then disclaim all responsibility.

Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.

Yes,” he said, “intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike.

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 destruction, Into solitude and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change.

Se sono tuoi, stabilisci tu le regole. A chi importa che cosa ne pensano i giocattoli? Spazza via l’intera famiglia di un giocattolo, poi dagliene una nuova. I bambini giocattolo, come i figli di Giobbe, sono intercambiabili.

Akin rested his chin on Iriarte’s shoulder and savored the strange pale scents – all pale now.

Could she give Doro what he wanted – what she herself had wanted for so long – children who would not die?

First learning, then proving I’d learned. Knowing and using the knowledge aren’t the same thing.