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You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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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
Play
Motive
Enough
Believing
Right
Mass
Believe
Help
Good
Helping
People
Another
Persons
Motives
Person
Masses

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?
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Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
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Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.
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The more defensive a society, the more conformist.
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Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.
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One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.
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It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself ... both and one. A shadow on snow.
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Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings
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Where there's property, there's theft.
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It is not human to be without shame and without desire.
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The light is the left hand of darkness.
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Great artists make the roads good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction — you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.
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If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun's first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumberable wind-stirred branches.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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Science fiction is not prescriptive it is descriptive.
Ursula K. Le Guin