“When apparent stability disintegrates,As it must--God is Change--People tend to give inTo fear and depression,To need and greed.When no influence is strong enoughTo unify peopleThey divide.They struggle,One against one,Group against group,For survival, position, power.They remember old hates and generate new ones,The create chaos and nurture it.They kill and kill and kill,Until they are exhausted and destroyed,Until they are conquered by outside forces,Or until one of them becomesA leaderMost will follow,Or a tyrantMost fear.”

“Change is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe. To us, that makes it the most powerful reality, and just another word for God.Earthseed: The Books of the LivingLauren Oya Olamina”

“My brother Keith begged to go with us as usual. He'll turn thirteen in a few days - August 14 - and the thought of waiting two more years until he's 15 must seem impossible to him. I understand. Waiting is terrible. Waiting to be older is worse than other kinds of waiting because there's nothing you can do to make it happen faster.”

“I'm a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer.”

“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 new community,Into vast, ongoingChange.”

“Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.”

“The differences you perceive between Humans—between groups of Humans—are the result of isolation and inbreeding, mutation, and adaptation to different Earth environments”