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Through him speaks a shrewd and magnanimous people, a people who have woven together into one wisdom a profound, old, terrible, and unimaginably vario...more

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Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

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You go to the Place of the Lie to find out the truth?

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Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems ine...more

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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Res...more

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Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future.

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[T]hey had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.

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Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.

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A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. ...more

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A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.

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You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from tha...more

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And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strengt...more

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

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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.

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I never thought before,” said Tirin unruffled, “of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, an...more