Author: Demosthenes
Cited by
- Orson, Scott Card (1)
- IN: Speaker for the Dead (1986) Fiction, American
EPIGRAPH: Since we are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociavle, tool-making creatures who arose frm other evolutionary paths and see not beasts but brothers, not rivals but fellow pilgrims journeying to the shrine of intelligence.
Yet that is what I see, or yearn to see. The difference between ramam and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be ramam, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.
FROM: Letter to the Framlings, (1986), Fictional, NULL