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Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (displaying: 1 - 10 of 384 quotes)

Ursula K. Le Guin
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He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anaresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work -- his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy -- and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in me?s eyes.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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As for ideology, the Hell with it.All of it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There were actually very few men who could face reality when the going got tough.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Time is not duration but intensity; time is the beat and the interval [...]
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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You can keep up that crap for years. But it finally catches up with you. And then you realise all you've done is save your shit to drown in.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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but you're not a traitor, you've merely been the tool of one. I don't punish tools. They do harm only in the hands of a bad workman.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is 'superior' to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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