“The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries ("museums"), and not yourselves, are full.”

“Expect nothing. Live frugallyOn surprise.become a strangerTo need of pityOr, if compassion be freelyGiven outTake only enoughStop short of urge to pleadThen purge away the need.Wish for nothing lar...”

“Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.”

“Surely the earth can be savedby all the peoplewho insiston love.”

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.”

“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”

“He could almost hear the wail of pain that went up from his heart. It was a sharp terrible personal pain the kind of pain that comes only when someone to whom you have never done any harm turns on ...”

“Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.”

“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”

“There are many things that make a man irritable when he arrives home from work in the evening and a sensible wife will usually notice the storm-signals and will leave him alone until he simmers down.”

“Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.”

“A lot of men wouldn't like being called a romantic. It's not macho enough.'Quite often men are fools.”

“Many women say that verbal violence causes more harm than physical violence because it damages self-esteem so deeply. Women have not wanted to hear battered women say that the verbal abuse was as h...”

“Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months of years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with ...”

“Shevek saw that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, ...”