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To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.

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
Good
Claim
Likely
Claims
Wise
Understand
Ends
Power

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Statesmen remember things selectively.
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To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else you must have another goal then you walk a different road.
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Ignorant power is a bane!
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In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.
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To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I have become very critical of the whole book award system and could preach on that subject for quite a while, but I do know what an award can mean to a writer early in her career. It can give an essential validation.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in.
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You can go home again...so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man's fate is not important. If it is not, what is? He could not endure those remembered words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, in all its forms, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A man who doesn't detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine time patience
Ursula K. Le Guin
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... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge) by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets) and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
Ursula K. Le Guin