Quote

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ursula K. Le Guin
Age: 88 †
Born: 1929
Born: October 21
Died: 2018
Died: January 22
Author
Feminist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Berkeley
California
Ursula Kroeber
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Think
Thinking
Suppressing
Refusing
Ignoring
Crush
Change
Ideas

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Image
Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
No society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
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
Image
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it... By using words well they strengthen their souls.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Sometimes I not only stand there and take it, I even smile at them and say I'm sorry. When I feel that smile coming onto my face, I wish I could take my face off and stamp on it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
As a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing,but does only and wholly what he must do.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
As a writer, you are free.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
There are very real differences between science fiction and realistic fiction, between horror and fantasy, between romance and mystery. Differences in writing them, in reading them, in criticizing them. Vive les différences! They're what gives each genre its singular flavor and savor, its particular interest for the reader - and the writer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Hope is a slow business.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
It is not human to be without shame and without desire.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the wall, the wall!
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
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