The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle, #4)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

one feels the man’s power as an augmentation of his character;

I craved to be like everybody else.

first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own.

“No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other.

Because only fear rules men. Nothing else works.

Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else.

There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves,

I must say “he,” for the same reasons as we used the masculine pronoun in referring to a transcendent god:

One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.

did they consider war to be a purely masculine displacement-activity,

The weather of Winter is so relentless, so near the limit of tolerability even to them with all their cold-adaptations, that perhaps they use up their fighting spirit fighting the cold.

His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell.

It’s mostly sand and rock desert. It

was warm to start with, and an exploitive civilization wrecked its natural balances fifty or sixty thousand years ago, burned up the forests for kindling, as it were.

There was something fluid, insubstantial, in the very heaviness of this city built of monoliths, this monolithic state that called the part and the whole by the same name.

The machine conceals the machinations.