Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

Your ability as republican volunteers, to rise to this challenge will mean that the two governments and others cannot easily hide from their obligations and their responsibility to resolve these problems.

...the citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor

It’s almost impossible to love your country and hate your government.

To say that a bad government must be established for fear of anarchy is really saying that we should kill ourselves for fear of dying.

I'm a politician. Politics is just a convenience for our life and we just have to create a beautiful world together that would be very convenient for us and just enjoyable.

I believe that it is my right and responsibility as an American to question our government when our government is wrong. I'm not one of the immature patriots who say my country right or wrong because my country is wrong now, and my country-the policies of my country are responsible for killing tens of thousands of innocent people, and I won't stand by and let that happen anymore.

When someone who wields political power does something you dislike or disagree with, it's incumbent upon you to object, criticize, and demand a different course. Those who refuse to do so are abdicating the most basic duty of citizenship and rendering themselves impotent.

If I defected at all, I defected from the government to the public

The right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to relieve themselves of oppression, if they are strong enough, whether by withdrawal from it, or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable.

You can't run a society or cope with its problems if people are not held accountable for what they do.

The best state is that in which bad men are not allowed to hold office, and good men are not allowed to refuse office.

After the signing of the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman on the street, "What have you given us, sir?" Franklin Responded, "A Republic, if you can keep it." A critical moment in history has come; our Republic is in jeopardy. Can we keep it? If the answer to that question, as I fear, is "no," then we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Surely, if it is the right of the people to "alter or abolish," it is their right to criticize, even severely, policies they believe destructive of the ends for which government has been established. This principle, in the Declaration of Independence, suggests that true patriotism lies in supporting the values the country is supposed to cherish: equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. When our government compromises, undermines, or attacks those values, it is being unpatriotic.

If what your country is doing seems to you practically and morally wrong, is dissent the highest form of patriotism?

Attempts at reform, when they fail, strengthen despotism, as he that struggles tightens those cords he does not succeed in breaking.

Politics is social work with power.

I think politics is everything.

Politics is an obsolete way of doing things. Although it was good a hundred years ago, it has no place in today's high tech society.

The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or limited sovereignty, or absolute power is the same [whether] in a majority of a popular assembly; an aristocratic council; or oligarchical junto and a single emperor - equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody and in every respect diabolical.

Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing.

I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies.

We can no longer tolerate what's going on in Ottawa and Edmonton. What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there's a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they're doing is a criminal act.

Two significant developments in the past several decades have been the collapse of communism as an ideology and the general acceptance, in rhetoric, if not practice, of liberal democracy.

They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or a military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view, something which leaves off as soon as that end is reached. It is not a public chore, to be got over with. It is a way of life. It is the life of a domesticated political and social creature who is born with a love for public life, with a desire for honor, with a feeling for his fellows; and it lasts as long as need be.