Quote

Animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do.We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. [. . .] The animals need only be and do.We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom.

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
Free
Belong
Evil
Useful
Littles
Animals
May
Neither
Little
Choose
Need
Animal
Yoked
Must
Call
Harmful
Needs
Freedom
Chose

More quotes by 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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Manipulated, one manipulates others.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord. It might to keep it open.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
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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Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The light is the left hand of darkness.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.
Ursula K. Le Guin