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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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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
Lies
Habit
Literature
Lying
Demagogues
Half
Ideologues
Best
Truths
Believe
Believing
Defense

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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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.
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Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?
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It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
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To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past. Therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.
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there are times when you have to speak because silence is betrayal.
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When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
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No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.
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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.
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When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.
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A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.
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There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.
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To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
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In art, 'good enough' is not good enough.
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To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place.
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To make a thief, make an owner to create crime, create laws.
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I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.
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I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.
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Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
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The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.
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Progress means nothing to presence.
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