Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (292 quotes, page 6)

“In our minds, lad. In our minds. The traitor, the self; the self that cries I want to live; let the world burn so long as I can live! The little traitor soul in us, in the dark, like the worm in the apple.”
Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 9, "Orm Embar" (Arren and Ged)

“What harm have the trees done them?”

Ursula K. Le Guin

he said. “Must they punish the grass for their own faults? Men are savages, who would set a land afire because they have a quarrel with other men.”
Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 9, "Orm Embar" (Arren)

Tree

“Do you not understand that I want to give this to you—and to Hain and the other worlds—and to the countries of Urras? But to you all! So that one of you cannot use it, as A-Io wants to do, to get power over the others, to get richer or to win more wars. So that you cannot use the truth for your private profit, but only for the common good.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

“In the end, the truth usually insists upon serving only the common good,” Keng said.
“In the end, yes, but I am not willing to wait for the end. I have one lifetime, and I will not spend it for greed and profiteering and lies. I will not serve any master.
Source: Hainish Cycle, The Dispossessed (1974), Chapter 11 (pp. 345-346)

Understanding , Country , War , Truth

“The law of evolution is that the strongest survives.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

“Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical.”
Source: Hainish Cycle, The Dispossessed (1974), Chapter 7 (p. 220)

Law

“I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. ... The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.
National Book Awards, November 2014 https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/national-book-awards-ursula-le-guin

Time , Imagination , Freedom , Hope

“And fourteen—fourteen is such a fearful age, when you find out so fast what you’re capable of being, but also what a toll the world expects.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Imaginary Countries (p. 204; first published in The Harvard Advocate (Winter 1973)
Short fiction, Orsinian Tales (1976)

World , Fear , Age

“For heroes do not make history—that is the historians’ job—but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

The Lady of Moge (p. 183)
Short fiction, Orsinian Tales (1976)

Chance , History , War , Making love

“I was afraid I’d fail. So I didn’t work.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Brothers and Sisters (p. 93; first published in The Little Magazine (1976) Vol. 10, Nos. 1 & 2)
Short fiction, Orsinian Tales (1976)