25 quotes
The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.
The Dispossessed (1974)
It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
The Dispossessed (1974)
Uninfluenced by others, he never knew he influenced them; he had no idea they liked him.
The Dispossessed (1974)
You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
The Dispossessed (1974)
To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.
The Dispossessed (1974)
Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.
The Dispossessed (1974)
Existence is its own justification, need is right.
The Dispossessed (1974)
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
The Dispossessed (1974)
To be whole is to be part;
true voyage is return.
The Dispossessed (1974)
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 Dispossessed (1974)
He felt that sense of being necessary which is the burden and reward of parenthood.
The Dispossessed (1974)
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.
The Dispossessed (1974)
You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing!
The Dispossessed (1974)
Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.
The Dispossessed (1974)
“The law of evolution is that the strongest survives.”
“Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical.”
The Dispossessed (1974)
Like all power seekers, Pae was amazingly shortsighted. There was a trivial, abortive quality to his mind, it lacked depth, affect, imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument.
The Dispossessed (1974)
The news had stirred him strangely. He listened for bulletins on the radio, which he had seldom turned on after finding that its basic function was advertising things for sale.
The Dispossessed (1974)
Grow up. Grow up. Time to grow up. You’re here now. We’re working on physics here, not religion. Drop the mysticism and grow up.
The Dispossessed (1974)
No doors were locked, few shut. There were no disguises and no advertisements. It was all there, all the work, all the life of the city, open to the eye and to the hand.
The Dispossessed (1974)
She saw time naïvely as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to.
The Dispossessed (1974)