The strength of Shevek's personality, unchecked by any self-consciousness or consideration of self-defense, was formidable.

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's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

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

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.

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?

Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.

Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.

There is no break in the wholeness of time.

They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned.

There comes a time when loneliness is stronger than fear.

But one way or another competing and weeding takes place . . . or a race goes downhill.

I'm not an inspirational quote kind of person.

I love when me and my friends don't know how to make something - there's that risk of failure, which should be there. If it's guaranteed not to fail, it's something you already know how to do.

There is no fear when you choose love. The more you choose love, the more love is in your life. It gets easier and easier.

Nothing can motivate me any more than I'm motivated.

I'm the luckiest writer on earth.

Though I was careful never to mention it, I began to see a new dimension in everything that happened.

Politeness is the flower of humanity.

Heaven, on occasion, half opens its arms to us; and that is the great moment.