He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.


Ursula K. Le Guin

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To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; the...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the ins...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicor...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
His words cost him so much, she thought, not like hers that just came dancing out of the air and wen...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
On the blank leaf glued to the inner back cover I drew the double curve within the circle, and black...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still th...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
There must be darkness to see the stars.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel......
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice
URSULA K. LE GUIN
And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to p...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
«I am tired,» he said. «I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever d...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: t...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsi...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issu...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I wr...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
This Stone

He went looking for a road
that doesn't lead to death.
He went looki...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do a...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
What are we so afraid of? Why don't we let 'em tell us we're afraid? What is it they're afraid of?" ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Why are men afraid of women?"
If your strength is only the other's weakness, you live in fear,"...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Orr had a tendency to assume that people knew what they were doing, perhaps because he generally ass...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
I don’t like making the rest of the world live in my dreams, but I certainly don’t want to live ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
They made love. Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made al...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Praise God from whom all blessings flow, including good-natured men.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
An irrelevant and poignant sensation of pleasure rose in him, like a tree that grew up and flowered ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his in...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
On top of pique, umbrage, and ennui. Oh, the French diseases of the soul.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
It was more than dignity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved. The infinite possib...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the b...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, rec...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the ti...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, an...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Saying that, he was suddenly himself again, despite his lunatic hair and eyes: a man whose personal ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand
outside things and run them...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the ti...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatene...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV se...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
I never knew a person who reacted so wholly and rapidly to a changed situation as Estraven. I was re...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that di...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in eit...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Truth is a matter of the imagination.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, tho...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without ca...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
He said after a little while, 'I see why you say that only men do evil, I think. Even sharks are inn...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibi...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
For discipline is the channel in which our acts run strong and deep; where there is no direction, th...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
I am tired of safe places, and roofs, and walls around me.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
In Enlad," said Arren after a while, "we have a story about the boy whose schoolmaster
was a st...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
But when we crave power over life—endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality—then desire b...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
What is evil?" asked the younger man. The round web, with its black center, seemed to watch them bot...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
To see a candle’s light, one must take it into a dark place.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Yet we were rescued by that fancy, and saved by a myth.
URSULA K. LE GUIN