Without war there are no heroes."" What harm would that be?"" Oh, Lamina, what a woman's question that is.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety?

— Ursula K. Le Guin

You always have to defend the imagination against idiots.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

You are like a lantern swathed and covered, hidden away in a dark place. Yet the light shines; they could not put out the light. They could not hide you.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

You are rich. You own. We are poor. We lack. You have. We do not have. Everything is beautiful here, only not the faces. On Andres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces. The men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels. There you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit, because our men and women are free possessing nothing. They are free. And you, the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail, each alone, solitary with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes, the wall, the wall.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. Furthermore, you can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.

— Ursula K. Le Guin