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.

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.

He loved Shevek, but he could not show him what freedom is, that recognition of each person's solitude which alone transcends it.

Had the love been permanent, there won’t have been divorces after love marriages. Had the love been everlasting, there won’t have been bad blood in the family.

Patience is the blue vitriol to control the fungal emotions of life

These heads sheltered by umbrellas be they of Zeb-un-Nisa, or Catherine of Cleopatra or Fenichka live with their own stories

In the end what you don't surrender, well, the world just strips away.

It was supposed to be gross, and now it's gorgeous.

I'm very confident in what I do, but I'd like to think I don't ever show any kind of cockiness or overconfidence.

best way to deal with fear is to face the nightmare!

One of the ways [racism] pops up is when they turn a comic into a live-action movie and there's this temptation to make Asian characters white.

Prayer is an impossibility without a living faith in the presence of God within.

One function of the imagination in autobiographical writing is to allow the writer to try out different versions of the self.