People From Colorado

"Madame says when we focus on our anger, our vision begins to constrict. Soon we are caught up in fury, and we turn it upon everyone."

"The poor are like foxes: they need intelligence in order to survive. The rich, however, have power; they don’t need good sense."

"“You don’t like him?” asked Aufors, wondering whether the man had gone mad on the job or been hired because he was mad enough for the job. There were jobs where madness was an asset. The military was full of them."

"It’s hard to talk like a human being when one hasn’t been treated like one for years!"

"“Thirst makes any wine drinkable…” “…And greed makes any crime thinkable.”"

"Despite his concern, he was not so out of control as to forget that a frantic man is a careless man, a lesson every soldier learns soon or dies wishing he had learned sooner."

"Perhaps my cynicism comes in good time. Better I have it early than too late."

"An intelligent woman herself, the Duchess had overestimated the Marshal’s intelligence. Not an ambitious woman, she had underestimated his ambition. So are many misread by other’s lights."

"He blunders about like an ape in an apiary, infuriating the inhabitants and missing all the sweetness!"

"“So the Glass Master story is real?” “Oh, yes, my dear. The story is real. When you must lie, my dear, lie as little as possible. That way you’ll have the least to remember.”"

"“I’ve met people like him.” Garth nodded sagely. “Men of customary inaction who can be spurred to sporadic excess. Such men often start ill-planned projects that they lack either energy to complete or the wit to abandon.”"

"“But how is it you know all this about how large the ocean is? I thought you girls were limited to pretty chatter and the economics of housekeeping. I didn’t know you learned geography.” “We don’t,” she said, somewhat shamefaced. “But we learned to read, and once one can read, one can learn anything.”"

"“By now, the Mahahmbi think we’ve always been around. They already believed they were God’s favorites when they came here, so it wasn’t hard to persuade them God created slaves for them.” Melanie snarled, “And if you believe you’re God’s favorite, killing a few women and children doesn’t bother you…”"

"“And all this time that I’ve worried over the state of my soul, I shouldn’t have bothered,” Genevieve said angrily."

"I know you want me to believe all this, but it seems little different from the religious stories we learned in school, esoteric and relatively pointless."

"You felt something huge and marvelous of which you are part, and in the moments you described, you forgot yourself for you were one with your world and with the sky above it, and even the stars looking down. There is nothing larger or more wonderful than that. Still, there are those who would prefer self. They will accept any belief, no matter how foolish, if it guarantees them personal immortality. I know people like that. But there are others who know themselves well enough to realize how limiting that is."

"No one ever has to believe! The universe is, it does not require belief. Do you think it will stop existing if you do not believe? Do you think far galaxies will harbor resentment against you if you do not believe? Do you resent the ant who does not look up and admire you? Never!"

"You reacted to stop the Mahahmbi killing your women, but you did nothing about their killing other women. It’s clear you could have done something. You are numerous enough that you could have killed the Mahahmbi who came out into the desert to perform those rituals!"

"Thinking it over later, she blamed TV and the movies for her immediate reaction. The media gobbled everything that happened or could happen, then spit it out, over and over, every idea regurgitated, every concept so mushed up that when anything remarkable actually occurred it was already a cliché. Like cloning or surrogate mothers or extraterrestrials and UFOs. The whole world had heard about it and seen movies about it, and had become bored with the subject before it even happened!"

"One of the strangest things I have encountered on your world, dear Benita, is that many of your people have no idea who they really are but many ridiculous ideas about what they are expected to be, plus many religious convictions about what they should be, although nobody is! One should not want to be anything but what one is because it creates unhappiness."

"Whatever he thinks, it’s time you stopped enabling other people so you can enable yourself."

"People don’t seem to rob bookstores much, more’s the pity for them."

"If a person torturing and killing people is evil, why are gods who torture and kill people called good?"

"Some professor of history wrote that cultures define their gods when they’re young and primitive, when their main concern is survival. They endow their gods with survival characteristics like omnipotence and authoritarianism, belligerence and suspicion, and that’s what goes into all their myths or scriptures. Then, if they survive long enough, they begin to develop morality. They examine their own history, and they learn that authoritarianism doesn’t accord with free will, that belligerence and suspicion are unhealthful, but this newly moral culture is stuck with its bigoted, interfering gods, plus it’s stuck with people who prefer the old bloody gods and use them as their justification for doing all kinds of awful things."

"She concluded: “Legalization would drive prices down, crime would stop, then we could take care of the addicts...” “And you do not do this because of...politics?” The Secretary of State said, “The war against drugs is big business. Thousands of people are on the payroll. The people on the payroll don’t want the problem solved, though they can’t say that out loud or, perhaps, even admit it to themselves. Instead, they continue to take a moral position that requires them to punish people. Punishing people is always considered moral.”"

"Military men! Damn it, they always thought in terms of hardware, black or white, our side or the other side. It was damned hard to get them to see gray at all, and getting them to tell dark gray from medium gray was impossible!"

"“Why do reporters have to dig into people’s privacy?” she fumed. “Communication is much like sex.” This set her back. “I don’t understand...” A chuckle. “Being celibate is often wise and prudent. People know this, but the inborn drive to reproduce makes their organs wag. Keeping silent is often wise and prudent. People know this, also, but the drive to question and tell makes their tongues wag. Sex spreads genetic material, good and bad; prying spreads information, true and false; natural selection takes over and both ethical failings contribute to continuing evolution.”"

"When agony is not present, no matter how imminent it looms, painful change must come from outside. This is a truth."

"We have a saying, “Where one lives, all live; where one suffers, all suffer.” One, in our language, includes all living things. In your language someone has said, “No man is an island,” which encompasses the concept but which, by mentioning only mankind, misses the point."

"Don’t you find that predators are those who most often assert absolute rights to personal freedoms?"

"The lustful who punish beauty would be wiser to control lust."

"If the children die, well, say they, it is the will of their gods. I do not like such ways; certainly I would not follow such gods."

"We always assume that living, breathing, sensible creatures want peace."

"“Thirty thousand some odd kids starve every day.” ”That’s not something we accept!” “Oh, hell, Senator. Don’t feed me the party line. When was the last time any of your colleagues voted for overseas family planning programs? You guys claim it’s to prevent abortion, but you know it’s not. You know damn well cutting family planning causes more abortions than it prevents, but you still do it. Why? Because most of the pro-life people are anti-contraception, too. And anti-sex education. And anti-gay. And anti-women’s-rights. But they’re pro-gun, pro-hunting, pro-military. Killing’s part of their lives."

"As previously announced, we are already studying how to remedy the problems with your schools. The causes of their failures are many, ramified, and deeply entrenched in local politics. The most amazing thing about the situation is that fifty years ago, a century ago, your schools were far better than they are now! They taught fewer subjects and taught the better, with far more success and far less jargon. Everyone agreed then that children were children, that is, impulsive, naive, and ignorant creatures in need of training. No one suggested then that schools or teachers had to put up with hostility or violence or that students had “rights” to such behavior or that freedom of speech included rudeness in the classroom. Persons could be expelled from school and sometimes were. Children were expected to be good citizens and mannerly, and the schools taught citizenship and manners. A necessary adjunct to the school was the truant officer, who sought out and detained any child under eighteen who was not in school, and children did not get out of school until they could read and write and do arithmetic. As is true on so many worlds, the theoreticians and politicians have ruined a good thing."

"“I think I mentioned to you that there’ve been some rumors about where certain soft contributions to senatorial campaigns come from. Dink works for Morse. Morse gets lots of soft money. This has got to be where it’s coming from.” “What does Morse do in return?” “He votes for the war on drugs. Votes more money for the DEA. Makes sure there’s no drug policy reform. The War on Drugs keeps the market up, keeps the dealers working, keeps the money flowing. They don’t want drugs legalized. It’d be like what happened when we stopped Prohibition. The gangsters didn’t want it stopped. They made millions.”"

"He thinks he’s a liberal, he’s generally on our side, but he’s also ex-military, and he falls for the national security gambit every time someone plays it. Star Wars. Stealth anything. 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. So long as Old Glory’s whipping in the breeze, it’s okay to deal guns to kids and cheat on your taxes."

"It is far more important to establish a civil and orderly society than it is to pander to abusive cultural and religious artifacts."

"The world had been repeatedly swept by war and famine and plague when the population had been a quarter of what it was now! Less than a hundred years ago. Sparse population didn’t equal peace. It never had. All it meant were fewer casualties."

"We would prefer to believe them, and we’ve gone along with them when they’ve told us the predators are a separate people, races that eat other intelligent life and who do not, therefore, eat Republicans. Or newsmen."

"That is a phrase I had never heard before, dear Benita. Playing politics. It is like playing war, a game for degenerates. Statesmen should not “play” politics."

"As our sages have said, youth builds a universe with self at the center."

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

"When I was a kid, Mami told me the Mexican gods weren’t the only bloody ones, and we should never serve gods that had been invented to take the blame for everything bloody, painful, primitive and unenlightened that people wanted to do. Why did we Israelites kill every man, woman, child and beast in that city? Why, the Lord Jehovah commanded it. Why do we Spaniards steal food from these Indian people, and mutilated them, and use them as slaves? Why, we do it so they will love Christ! Why do we Aztecs torture and sacrifice people? Huitzilopotchli demands it! Whether it was the Israelites invading Canaan or the Spanish invading the Southwest, or one Mexican tribe warring against another, the answer was always the same. We enslave and torture and mutilate and kill in the name of our god."

"My grandfather said people who can learn, learn morality the way they learn everything else, by building on history. He also said that some people cannot learn from history, so they cannot change. For them, there’s only one book or tradition or whatever it’s called in their religion, and in that book God is eternal and whatever the book says God commanded two or three or four thousand years ago, God still commands today. That may be kill homosexuals or kill nonbelievers. It may say enslave your enemies. It may say mutilate or sequester women, or sell your ten-year-old daughter for somebody’s third wife."

"“It does not seem impossible,” murmured Her Exactitude. “Moreover, it accords with our ethical imperative. Luckily, our imperative is based upon experience, rather than upon artifacts or scriptures, so we are not likely to be thrown into disorganization by judgments made centuries ago. We do not assert as true anything which we have not proven or seen proven by others. Thus, we never claimed that we were the center either of the universe or of a deity’s attention. While we do not deny deity, we do not presume to understand it, plea bargain with it, or tell others what shape it takes. It does make life easier.”"

"“You’re pro-life,” Dink commented. Briess widened the slit of his mouth into an excruciating smile. “No, my friend, I’m merely anti-woman. I was born in the wrong system. Once female life expectancy exceeded that of men in the U.S., it was obvious we were doing something wrong.”"

"“It could be any way at all by the will of Aitun,” snapped Chiddy. Aitun lets everything happen that can happen! It is up to intelligence to select!”"

"“A lot of things they speak of doing are things many humans have wanted to do but have never been able to muster a mandate to get them done. Things like legalizing drugs to take out the profit motive. Or paying teachers the way we do athletes, depending on how effective they are. Or getting rid of weapons whose only purpose is to kill people.” “Is a mandate necessary?” “If you’re going to overcome an economic incentive, yes.” “Logic has no part?” “No part at all. People can see the problem, they’re not stupid, but they can’t influence the legislators the way money can. Even when bad situations go on and on until the people are desperate for a correction, even when they threaten legislators with voting them out, the money still prevails.” “It is hard for me to see how this could happen.” Chad said, “The legislators react to a problem by writing a law, let’s say to put repeat drunk drivers in jail. The liquor industry objects, because they don’t like a lot of discussion about drunkenness, it hurts their image. The legislators react by amending the law to create a commission to study how best to jail drunk drivers. Then, when the budget bills come along, they fund only the commission. The appointees to the commission include representatives of the liquor industry. “This allows the legislators to claim success, because the law got voted in. The liquor industry also claims success, because they made sure the law won’t work. “The next step is to hire a lot of people to work for the commission, many of whom are also liquor industry supporters, and the commission begins to issue long, complicated, vaguely pointless reports. Now, however, there are jobs involved, and legislators can’t get rid of jobs, even useless ones. “Then, repeatedly, the lawmakers amend the law further, tweaking this and changing that, but always adding more jobs—until we have a bureaucratic monstrosity that’s in the business of helping the liquor industry prevent legislation against drunk drivers. That’s the way our Forestry Service got to be owned by the lumbermen, and our DEA got to be owned by the drug cartels, welfare got to be owned by a social work hierarchy, and schools got to be owned by professional educationalists. None of them work, because that’s not what they’re designed to do.”"

"Picture this: A mountain splintering the sky like a broken bone, its western precipice plummeting onto jumbled scree."