A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behavior on Urras.

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

Where hopes are unrealistic, fears often become exaggerated; where dreams alone are blueprints, nightmares result.

I think Paul Sarbanes and his wife Christine socialized with them [George and Heather Mitchell] more than I did, but we all hung out, or we saw each other in groups.

What of the souls already released from their bodies? We believe that they are overwhelmed in that vast sea of eternal light and of luminous eternity

The key is to be honest. Be honest, but don't play yourself.

I would imagine that not having any potential could be less difficult than not fulfilling it.

A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance.

You don't have to be singing about love all the time in order to give love to the people. You don't have to keep flashing those words all the time.

Never settle for the path of least resistance

I'm always pre-occupied with what it is that I'm doing at the moment.