Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.

This age of terror will end one day, but whether our society can restore the feeling of freedom that once was our birthright is hard to predict.

America is a remarkable country, but I have a feeling that it's a different country after 9/11.

In real life, what scares me is politicians, corporations and people that think they know what the world should be.

After a long time, I cleared my throat. “So anyway, when we get to Nevada...I think we should rethink your dad’s rule.” Alex glanced down at me and smiled – the first real smile I’d seen on his face in a long time. “You know what? It’s already been rethought and completely ditched,” he said. And he wrapped his arms around me and we stood looking up at the mountains, with the rising rays of the sun lighting them from the east.

Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self. When we don't see the self as self, what do we have to fear?

I understand that people are afraid. Because I think censorship is about fear. It's just fear being projected onto art.

I think that nobody - certainly in this world - can say that they don't have the human denial element about them or fear or whatever it is as juxtaposed with faith and hope and freedom and love.

If that moment had been a real thing, it would've been a butterfly, flapping and fluttering toward the sun.

Those who truly love and respect you will respect your boundaries. I think freeing oneself from codependency and fear is vital for well-being.

When people become frightened, they look for things of real value. They will go to monetary metals, gold and silver, and they will buy other things, such as buying property. But no matter what we have, whether we have our gold coins or we have our property, if we have an authoritarian government, that is our greatest threat. So, I would like to think that there is no perfect protection, other than shrinking the size and scope and power of government, so that we can be left alone and take care of ourselves.

[Marco] Rubio says we should collect all Americans' records all of the time. The Constitution says otherwise. I think they're both wrong. I think we defeat terrorism by showing them that we do not fear them.

It be better, I think, to climb out in search of something, instead of hating, what you're leaving.

As long as your abuser has you scared, you will stay in the cycle of abuse. Thinking of solutions helps you to escape.

I think... that when it comes to us, anything is possible.

As soon as people become a little less fearful, they will also begin demanding more freedom.

The Doctor: 'You know when grown-ups tell you everything's going to be fine, but you really think they're lying to make you feel better?' Amelia: 'Yeah...' The Doctor: 'Everything's going to be fine.

You don't really think The Terminator exists, but you want him to exist.

It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and oppression of one person by another; where there is not unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of losing his job, his home and his bread. Only in such a society personal and any other freedom can exist for real and not on paper.

You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the long familiar ground that in that moment seems so glorious, so charged with beauty, strange. In their jaws you are carried so effortlessly, with such great care that you think it will never end, you long for it not to end, and then you wake and know that, indeed, they have not brought you back.

One of the things I think the next president has to do is to stop fanning people's fears. If we spend all our time feeding the American people fear and conflict and division, then they become fearful and conflicted and divided. And if we feed them hope and we feed them reason and tolerance, then they will become tolerant and reasonable and hopeful.

All I know is that so long I am asleep I am rid of all fears and hopes and toils and glory, and long live the man who invented sleep, the cloak that covers all human thirst.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems Omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

It is to the United States that all freemen look for the light and the hope of the world. Unless we dedicate ourselves completely to this struggle, unless we combat hunger with food, fear with trust, suspicion with faith, fraud with justice - and threats with power, nations will surrender to the futility, the hopelessness, the panic on which wars feed.

The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man's face would make you think of it but his hope might, his courage might.