Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

Might was the measure of right.

They are a scurvy race and simply savages. We could beat hell out of them.

The art of power often involves brutality — and other offenses too.

Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.

When [men] go to war, what they want is to impose on their enemies the victor's will and call it peace.

There is no peace now, and there will never be peace, so long as one rules over another.

What you get with violence can be maintained only with violence

Force, punishment, and violence are patriarchy's answer to conflicts and social problems. Patriarchy finds its ultimate expression in war.

Force is not a remedy.

Rape, mutilation, abuse, and theft are the natural outcome of a world in which force rules, in which human beings are objects.

Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression.

Nobody knows through how many thousands of years fighting men have made a place for themselves while the weak and peaceable have gone to the wall.

Palestinians have had to live for a long time with the fact that Israelis had power over them in their everyday lives.

The world is ruled by violence, or at least the imminent threat of violence. It always has been.

The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

No one need think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall and must be red and bloody.

Powerlessness corrupts: absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely

Where there's no might there's no right.

Force in today's world, just as in the past, is what determines rights.

War is an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.

There is no more contemptible poison than power over one's fellow men.

What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor.

We Beate the Savages outt of the Island burned their howses Ransaked their Temple Tooke down the Corpes of their deade kings from out of their Toambes And caryed away their pearles.... The Salvages still contineweinge their mallice Ageinste us.