A Quote by Octavia Butler

Religion is a dangerous prod, because it can always be misused and get out of hand, but it's useful for keeping people on the straight and narrow. — © Octavia Butler
Religion is a dangerous prod, because it can always be misused and get out of hand, but it's useful for keeping people on the straight and narrow.
If someone is a straight jazzhead, or a straight metalhead, or straight classical, they have a very narrow range of what they allow into their lives. But the people who listen to what we put out into the world have to be open-minded. Because we're so pluralist.
My view is that organized religion is a very dangerous tool that's been misused by a lot of people.
Atheists blame religion when priests do wrong. Anything can be misused, whether it is nuclear power or a matchstick. So, how can I blame religion? Patriotism too can be misused, by misinforming others and eliminating people, so do we start hating the country?
Science without religion is dangerous because it necessarily entails a mechanization of humanity and consequent loss of individual autonomy and spirituality. On the other hand, religion without science is powerless because it lacks an effective means through which to actualize the ultimate reality. Science and religion must work together harmoniously.
I've walked with very famous people down red carpets over to the crowd of thousands of people, and you'll reach out to shake their hand and they've got a camera in their hand. And they don't even get their hand out, because they're recording the whole time.
If you get it out into the urban field it's going to be used or misused but it'll also probably provide a way of people acknowledging what the aesthetic is about because people have to confront it every day.
People always say to me, 'You have such a clearly defined sense of style,' and when I hear it, I get crazed, because what I hear - and I know they mean it as a compliment - is that I have such a narrow vision that I can't get out of it.
It?s not that Monsanto is making money out of the blue. It?s making money by coercing and literally forcing people to pay for what was free. Take water, for instance. Water has always been free. We?ve never paid for drinking water. The World Bank says the reason water has been misused is because it was never commercially priced. But the reason it?s been misused is because it was wasted by the big users?industry, which polluted it.
Promptings for us to do good come from the Holy Ghost. These promptings nudge us further along the straight and narrow path of discipleship. The natural man doesn't automatically think of doing good. It isn't natural. How many people worry about the car behind them or the person below them? The natural man just doesn't do it. For us, however, these promptings enlarge our awareness of other people's needs and then prod us to act accordingly.
I don't know how you feel, but I feel like writing, clarity of thought, and truth have been validated because we see what happens when we get lax in those areas. I'm excited by the idea that writers like us can actually reach out and try to understand and prod and agitate the people who are in support of Trump because we have the tools to do it. We're language people and we're idea people.
Keeping religion immune from criticism is both unwarranted and dangerous.
There are millions of young children being educated to a very narrow-minded view of religion. And it's out of that education of large numbers of young people that you then get this extremism.
What is important is not that you have a defeat but how you react to it. There is always the possibility to transform a defeat into something else, something new, something strong. All the good stories, all the people we remember are the ones who do this, who make victories out of their failures. Because the victories teach nothing. The victories are not useful. They are often dangerous.
Israel is not dangerous on one hand, but on the other hand it is dangerous. Human life is just dangerous, in general.
I do everything by hand... Even if I'm doing really big letters and I spend a lot of time going over the line and over the line and trying to make it straight, I'll never be able to make it straight. From a distance it might look straight, but when you get close up, you can always see the line waver. And I think that's where the beauty is.
Dad always said that he had enough trouble sorting the fiction out of so-called facts, without reading fiction. He always said that science was already too muddled without trying to make it jibe with religion. He said those things, but he also said that science itself could be a religion, that a broad mind was always in danger of becoming narrow.
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