We who are called royal are those who speak for our people to the powers of the earth and sky, as those powers transmit their will through us to the people. We are go-betweens. The chief duty of a kin...
We weren’t cruel, we were ignorant, foolish. Children are ignorant and foolish. But they learn. If they are given a chance to learn.
We are not seeking power. We are seeking the end of power! ... The means are the end. ... Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice!
WakefulIslandedSnow and silence in the streets.Winter in the bone.In silent houses people sleep.each one alone.Self-islanded by thought and dreamthe solitary soulforgets the deepest depth, the earthth...
Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly....
To say that an Orgota government fell means, of course, only that one group of Commensals replaced another group of Commensals in the controlling offices of the Thirty-Three. Some shadows got shorter...
To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.
To hear, one must be silent.’ The
To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world.
To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more.
To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen n...
Thus they both set a fatal trap for the believer: if you believe in God you can’t believe in evolution, and vice versa. But this is rather like saying if you believe in Tuesday you can’t believe in ar...
These two issues combined—our inability to deal with our own numbers and our insistence that we are what matters most—may well be the finish of us.
There was room for them. A great deal of Italy, back then, was forest. Where man goes, trees die; or, to paraphrase Tacitus, we make a desert and call it progress.
There seems to be a firewall in my mind against ideas expressed in numbers and graphs rather than words, or in abstract words such as Sin or Creativity. I just don’t understand. And incomprehension is...
There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unrea...
There are souls, he thought, who's umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as the enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus...
The word he used was not wallowing, there being no animals on Anarres to make wallows; it was a compound, meaning literally coating continually and thickly with excrement. The flexibility and precisio...
The idea that only belief sees the world as wonderful, and the cold hard facts of science take all the color and wonder out of it, the idea that scientific understanding automatically threatens and we...
The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they wer...