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You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. 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.

We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our “brotherhood.

The individuals, like the particles of atomic physics, could not be counted, nor their positions ascertained, nor their behavior predicted. And yet, as a mass, that enormous mass did what it had been expected to do by the organizers of the strike: it gathered, marched in order, sang, (…)

Engineers are themselves proof of the existence of causal reversibility.

he had grim thoughts about the reality of hunger, and about the possible inadequacy of his society to come through a famine without losing the solidarity that was its strength. It was easy to share when, there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force catered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.

There is exhilaration in finding that the bond is stronger, after all, than all that tries the bond.

There’s a point, around age twenty, (…) when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
Or at least accept them with resignation.

mutual trust allayed depression or anxiety. “We’ll see each other through,” they said, serenely.

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of (...) anyone doing needed work and doing it well — this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.

And there morality enters in. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it.

But it’s true, chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don’t see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can’t make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. (...)

Infinite repetition is an atemporal process. It must be compared, referred to some other cyclic or noncyclic process, to be seen as temporal.

Sequency explains beautifully our sense of linear time, and the evidence of evolution. It includes creation, and mortality. But there it stops. It deals with all that changes, but it cannot explain why things also endure. It speaks only of the arrow of time — never of the circle of time.

Within the strict terms of Simultaneity Theory, succession is not considered as a physically objective phenomenon, but as a subjective one.

(...)
“Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical. You see, we have neither prey nor enemy, on Anarres. We have only one another. There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.”

“The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!”
“Your civilization, perhaps. Ours hides nothing. It is all plain. (…) We follow one law, only one, the law of human evolution.”
“The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!”
(...)

She studied him, smiling. There was something professional, actress-like, in her pose. People do not usually gaze at one another intently at very close range, unless they are mothers with infants, or doctors with patients, or lovers.

he had not considered what it might be like to be on one’s own in a society where men did not trust one another, where the basic moral assumption was not mutual aid, but mutual aggression.

As if deserving meant anything. As if one could earn beauty, or life!

if the deluded and simple-minded utopist had silenced him so easily, that was shameful; but if the man whom he could not help liking, admiring, so that he longed to deserve his respect, as if it were somehow a finer grade of respect than any currently available elsewhere — if this man despised him, then the shame was intolerable, and he must hide it, lock it away the rest of his life in the darkest room of his soul.

“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”

The delicate concentric mobiles hanging at different levels overhead moved with the introverted precision, silence, mystery of the organs of the body or the processes of the reasoning mind.

This concern, feebly called “love of nature,” seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her.

She saw time naively as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to.
But (...) unless the past and the future were made part of the present by memory and intention, there was, in human terms, no road, nowhere to go

..."I do want it. Only I don’t need it. And if I take what I don’t need, I’ll never get to what I do need. (...) Only, when you spoke, I seemed to see clear into you, into the center. But you might have been quite different from what I thought you were. That wouldn’t be your fault, after all,” she added. “It’s just that I knew what I saw in you was what I needed. Not just wanted!"

he found their independence of mind more interesting. They preserved autonomy of conscience even at the cost of becoming eccentric

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

But really, it is the question of ends and means. After all, work is done for the work’s sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life. The private conscience knows that. And also the social conscience, the opinion of one’s neighbors. There is no other reward, no other law.One’s own pleasure, and the respect of one’s fellows.That is all.When that is so, then you see the opinion of the neighbors becomes a very mighty force

Here you think that the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit, but where there’s no money the real motives are clearer, maybe. People like to do things. They like to do them well. People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them, they can — egoize, we call it — show off? — to the weaker ones. (…) A person likes to do what he is good at doing…