Skip to content

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 Parable of the Talents (1998)

Another quote →

Notes from Wikiquote

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 lied to. | To be led by a tyrant | is to sell yourself | and those you love | into slavery. | Chapter 11 (p. 201)

Topics

More quotes by Octavia Butler

If everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture?

Parable of the Sower (1993)

Short-lived people, people who could die, did not know what enemies loneliness and boredom could be.

Wild Seed (1980)

You tend to resent people you’re afraid of.

Parable of the Sower (1993)

It’s better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them.

Parable of the Sower (1993)

If you hear nonsense like that often enough for long enough, you begin to believe it.

Parable of the Talents (1998)

All Octavia Butler quotes →

You may also like

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now.

Hunter S. Thompson

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

George Santayana Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true.

Ulysses S. Grant Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Octavia Butler (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.