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The backside of heroism is often rather sad women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul.

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
Thinking
Also
Servant
Earth
Sky
Women
Achievement
May
Sea
Backside
Soul
Large
Backsides
Real
Rather
Servants
Men
Less
Heroism
Think
Often
Smaller

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So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.
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We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
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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.
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Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings
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Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.
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True understanding is the spur of genius
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All knowledge is partial, infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth.
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To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.
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It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in might making right power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
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We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
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But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.
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It is good to have an end to journey towards but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
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If your voice is heard by more people because you've earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.
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No matter how intelligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how to see.
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If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
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