Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed (1974)

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A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Existence is its own justification, need is right.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin. We can't stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.

Ursula K. Le Guin
To be whole is to be part;
true voyage is return.

Ursula K. Le Guin
People like to do things. They like to do them well. People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them, they can—egoize, we call it—show off?—to the weaker ones. Hey, look, little boys, see how strong I am! You know? A person likes to do what he is good at doing.... But really, it is the question of ends and means. After all, work is done for the work's sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life. The private conscience knows that. And also the social conscience, the opinion of one's neighbors. There is no other reward, on Anarres, no other law. One's own pleasure, and the respect of one's fellows. That is all. When that is so, then you see the opinion of the neighbors becomes a very mighty force.

Ursula K. Le Guin
No matter how intelligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how to see.

Ursula K. Le Guin
He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand.

Ursula K. Le Guin
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
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
Uninfluenced by others, he never knew he influenced them; he had no idea they liked him.

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
He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?

Ursula K. Le Guin
Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.

Ursula K. Le Guin
It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self — ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality — the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness — that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

Ursula K. Le Guin
No doors were locked, few shut. There were no disguises and no advertisements. It was all there, all the work, all the life of the city, open to the eye and to the hand.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.

Ursula K. Le Guin
When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you, and the fellow countrymen bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder if you are, in fact, a traitor.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.

Ursula K. Le Guin
But what's the good of this sort of 'understanding,' Dearri said, if it doesn't result in practical, technological applications? Just word juggling, isn't it?
You ask questions like a true profiteer, Shevek said, and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dearri with the most contemptuous word in his vocabulary; indeed Dearri nodded a bit, accepting the compliment with satisfaction.

Ursula K. Le Guin
You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that's precisely what our society is doing!

Ursula K. Le Guin
Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.

Ursula K. Le Guin
She saw time naïvely as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!

Ursula K. Le Guin
She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary.

Ursula K. Le Guin
He felt that sense of being necessary which is the burden and reward of parenthood.

Ursula K. Le Guin
It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist.

Ursula K. Le Guin
If you can see a thing whole, he said, it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon—I don't want it! But I'm not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, 'O lovely!' I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

Ursula K. Le Guin