top of page
.png){kind=small}
"War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to "a war against whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off."
Standard
Customized
Explore more quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
"There are talking dogs all over the place, unbelievably boring they are, on and on and on about sex and shit and smells, and smells and shit and sex, and do you love me, do you love me, do you love me."
"Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever."
"Somewhere in the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice he wonders why his companion is ashamed to cry. I could have told him even then that it was not shame so much as fear. Now I went on through the Sinoth Valley, through the evening of his death, into the cold country that lies beyond fear. There I found you can weep all you like, but there's no good in it."
"If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them. Their inexperience saved the passenger's life."
"The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them."
"We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone."
"Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."
"Cinders patter, falling with the snow. We creep infinitesimally northward through the dirty chaos of a world in the process of making itself. Praise then Creation unfinished!"
Exlpore more Ethics quotes
"But you can't just leave it at that!" said Anathema, pushing forward. "Think of all things you could do! Good things."Like what?" said Adam suspiciously."Well... you could bring all the whales back, to start with."He put his head on one side. "An' that'd stop people killing them?"She hesitated. It would have been nice to say yes."An' if people do start killing 'em, what would you ask me to do about 'em?" said Adam. "No. I reckon I'm getting the hang of this now. Once I start messing around like that, there'd be no stoppin' it. Seems to me, the only sensible thing is for people to know if they kill a whale, they've got a dead whale."
"Religion [dharma] is that where there is no irreligion (adharma, immorality). Religion cannot exist where there is irreligion. There can be only one or the other. Behind every intention, there is either [the force of] religion or [the force of] irreligion."
"We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future?"
"Cruel people are not only people who kill innocent people with guns. Individuals who steal from government coffers to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor are grossly cruel."
"There is one thing, Emma, which a man can always do if he chooses, and that is his duty; not by manoeuvring and finessing, but by vigour and resolution. - Mr. Knightley."
"Of course, in the process, you must never do harm to others in any serious way, or you'll cease to amuse Him. Then payment comes due for promises you didn't keep."
"It is better to be slave to righteousness than slave to sin."
bottom of page