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How could sane people like the ones he had left behind in Phoenix do such a thing—or, how could they let insane people gain control of devices that could do so much harm? If you knew a man was out of his mind, you restrained him. You didn’t give him power.
“Human beings fear difference,” Lilith had told him once. “Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialization. If you don’t understand this, you will. You’ll probably find both tendencies surfacing in your own behavior.” And she had put her hand on his hair. “When you feel a conflict, try to go the Oankali way. Embrace difference.”
Well, sometimes it’s a good thing to scare people. Sometimes fear is all that will keep them from doing stupid things.”
They could not exist without symbiotic relationships with other creatures. Yet such relationships frighten them.”
All people who know what it is to end should be allowed to continue if they can continue.
You and those who help you will give them the tools to create a civilization that will destroy itself as certainly as the pull of gravity will keep their new world in orbit around its sun.”
Human purpose isn’t what you say it is or what I say it is. It’s what your biology says it is—what your genes say it is.”
