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Book: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
Quotes of Book: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous
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  1. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous

    assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work-his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy-and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But
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  2. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous

    He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand.
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  3. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous

    Pravic was not a good swearing language. It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist."
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  4. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous

    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. They were intelligent, their minds were already disciplined to the clarity of science, and they were sixteen years old. But at this point the pleasure of the argument ceased for Shevek, as it had earlier for Kvetur. He was disturbed.
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  5. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous

    He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in. He
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  6. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous

    We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is 'superior' to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box-Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last. Desar was right; it is Urras; Hell is Urras." For
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  7. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous

    Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn't work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscience.
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  8. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous

    all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek looked at this monstrous pettiness with contempt, and without interest.
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  9. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous

    the longer he lived on Urras, the less real it became to him. It seemed
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  10. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous

    figurines and souvenirs and kickshaws and mementos and gewgaws and bric-a-brac, everything either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use; acres of luxuries, acres of excrement.
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  11. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous

    Bedap, who had been putting on weight at the waist and was serious about exercise, was trotting earnestly around the playing field. The others were sitting on a dusty bank under trees, getting their exercise verbally.
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  12. Ursula K. Le Guin _ The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous

    If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home. Takver"
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