Top 40 Sheri S. Tepper Quotes (2025 Update)

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. “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

3. “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

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “Science fiction still is an idea genre.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

9. “Do you realize it’s been only a century that we’ve been able to go from house to car to office to car to wherever, with the heater on, and the defroster on, protected from the rain and the cold? It hasn’t been much longer than that we’ve had lighting for streets. Think of all that darkness, all that world out there, all that mystery that we’ve turned into well-lighted concrete bunkers, safe and warm and dull.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

10. “Men like to think well of themselves, and poets help them do it.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

11. “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

12. “Boys play with death as though it were a game, cutting their teeth on daggers.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

13. “The sooner we can separate salvageable skeptics from self-righteous absolutists, the sooner we can move along.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

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

— Sheri S. Tepper

15. “The practice of diplomacy, I have found, is sometimes like eating soup with a fork: much activity yielding little nourishment.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

16. “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

17. “The only difference between a futile madman and an effective tyrant is power and will.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

18. “I’m not sure a world run by women would be any better. They’re human beings!”

— Sheri S. Tepper

19. “Recent history takes a while to set. People really don’t know what just happened. They only figure it out later.”

— 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. “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

22. “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

23. “No aristocrat would sit in the wild grass to dream. Aristocrats have gardens for that, if they dream at all.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

24. “There is nothing so delightful, so pure, so innocent or enjoyable that some group has not forbidden it.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

25. “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

26. “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

27. “The expression of divinity is in variety.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

28. “Man constantly prayed to God for peace, but peace never happened, so he decided that his god must really want war because the other side was sinful. Man invented and extolled virtues which could only be exemplified under conditions of war, like heroism and gallantry and honor, and he gave himself laurel wreaths or booty or medals for such things, thus rewarding himself for behaving well while sinning. He did it when he was a primitive, and he went on with it after he thought he was civilized.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

29. “Often we wish to be exorcised of demons we ourselves have allowed house room.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

30. “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

31. “Humanity is meant to live as part of creation, not as the owner of it or to make war against it.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

32. “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

33. “Once we’re grown, all we can hear are what the poet described: the echoes, dying.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

34. “Rich people didn’t get in that kind of mess. They never had. Only the poor got trapped: by ignorance, by religion, by self-righteous laws passed by people who broke them with impunity.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

35. “The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

36. “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

37. “We’re so old that the winds of age echo along our ribs and pick at our eye sockets. We could be gone tomorrow. A chill, say, or a little slip on the cliff side. I feel as fragile as a dried flower. I rattle a little in the moving air, but I’m only coherent dust-a shape of what once was. My essence is going.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

38. “The 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.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

39. “There was an expression on her face at certain times, an expression of unconscious joy which came from a part of her he had always coveted, a separate being he never saw when he was with her. He had seen that being in the arena or the hunt, skimming the green pastures towards the high fences, all there between the posts and over the water, winging on danger and delight, a bird soaring with a singing face. He wanted to hold that bird.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

40. “Like frogs, each thinking its own puddle was the center of the universe, we believed that God worried over us each of us. Strange that we should realize Pride is a sin yet still be willing prey to such arrogance.”

— Sheri S. Tepper

41. “Much of life,” he said to me, “depends on our being ignorant of reality. If we understood reality, we would never go on.”

— Sheri S. Tepper