The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle, #6)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.

Their society maintained them in complete freedom from want, distractions, and cares. What they were free to do, however, was another question.

their freedom from obligation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of initiative.

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.

He could not rebel against his society, because his society, properly conceived, was a revolution, a permanent one, an ongoing process.

The usage the creator spirit gives its vessels is rough, it wears them out, discards them, gets a new model.

To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.