"If women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?...I mean, men give her [a queen] pow...
What good is power when you're too wise to use it?
~ Ursula K. Le Guin ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
What good is power when you're too wise to use it?
More Ursula K. Le Guin quotes
"Through him speaks a shrewd and magnanimous people, a people who have woven together into one wisdom a profound, old, terrible, and unimaginably vario...
"The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the ...
"I fear liars, and I fear tricksters, and worst I fear the bitter truth. And so I rule my country well. Because only fear rules men. Nothing else works...
"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...
"The little Otak was hiding in the rafters of the house, as it did when strangers entered. There it stayed while the rain beat on the walls and the fir...
"Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or for praise. Think of th...
"As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud,...
"Under his feet he felt the hillroots going down and down into the dark, and over his head he saw the dry, far fires of the stars. Between, all things ...
"If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
"The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is ...
"... privilege was obligation; command was service; power, the gift itself, entailed a heavy loss of freedom.
"If women had power what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?
"Power inheres in a center. You're going to the center.
"I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the be...