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I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
It seemed, at least, that they had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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They say Mars absolves the warrior from the crimes of war, but those who were not the warriors, those for whom the war was said to be fought, even though they never wanted it to be fought, who absolves them?
Ursula K. Le Guin -
He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
Those were men in whom great strength and knowledge served the will to evil and fed upon it. Whether the wizardry that serves a better end may always prove the stronger, we do not know. We hope.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the greatest revolution of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
Easy victories aren’t worth winning.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Armed men don’t sit down and talk.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
They prevented men from doing anything. But they did nothing themselves. They did not rule, they only blighted.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
The juniper-scented liquor had volatilized his thoughts; he should be thinking that madness caused this man to call himself a king, but was thinking rather that kingship had driven this man mad.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
Like all power seekers, Pae was amazingly shortsighted. There was a trivial, abortive quality to his mind, it lacked depth, affect, imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The news had stirred him strangely. He listened for bulletins on the radio, which he had seldom turned on after finding that its basic function was advertising things for sale.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
A man can trust his luck, but a society can’t; and cultural change, like random mutation, may make things chancier. So they have gone very slowly. At any one point in their history a hasty observer would say that all technological progress and diffusion had ceased. Yet it never has. Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
How could anybody think this man was sick? All right, so he had funny dreams. That was better than being plain mean and hateful, like about one quarter of the people she had ever met.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
'The law of evolution is that the strongest survives.''Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical.'
Ursula K. Le Guin -
Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
It was men’s ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
He liked the vast openness of sky and prairie, and found loneliness a pleasure with so immense a domain to be alone in.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
'Is it a wicked thing, then?''I should call it a misunderstanding, rather. A misunderstanding of life. Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.'
Ursula K. Le Guin -
We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.
Ursula K. Le Guin