Powers (Annals of the Western Shore #3)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

I knew why Everra did it. It wasn’t meanness; it was Morality. He was training me to do what I didn’t want to do and not do what I did want to do, because that was a lesson I had to learn. The Forty-first.

Freedom is largely a matter of seeing that there are alternatives.

leadership means personal magnetism, active intelligence, unquestioning acceptance of responsibility, and something harder to define: a tension between justice and compassion, which is never satisfied by one without the other, and so can seldom be wholly satisfied.