"Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on. Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. [...] It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free. Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine."

"“Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. “He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”"

"Character and training disposed him not to interfere in other mens’s business. His job was to find out what they did, and his inclination was to let them go on doing it. He preferred to be enlightened, rather than to enlighten; to seek facts rather than the Truth. But even the most unmissionary soul, unless he pretend he has no emotions, is sometimes faced with a choice between commission and omission. “What are they doing?” abruptly becomes, “What are we doing?” and then, “What must I do?”"

"Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done."

"And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises, and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?"

"The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying."

"A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt."

"Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way."

"How does one hate a country, or love one? [...] I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry?"

"It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end."

"What is more arrogant than honesty?"

"A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it."

"The First Envoy to a world always comes alone. One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion."

"Mr. Ai, we’ve seen the same events with different eyes; I wrongly thought they’d seem the same to us."

"It is not human to be without shame and without desire."

"To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free. To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness."

"To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here “all roads lead to Mishnory.” To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road."

"It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke."

"This, at least, is the accepted explanation, though like most economic explanations it seems, under certain lights, to omit the main point."

"Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it."

"He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell."

"“The mission I am on overrides all personal debts and loyalties.” “If so,” said the stranger with fierce certainty, “it is an immoral mission.”"

"If civilization has an opposite, it is war."

"A man can trust his luck, but a society can’t; and cultural change, like random mutation, may make things chancier. So they have gone very slowly. At any one point in their history a hasty observer would say that all technological progress and diffusion had ceased. Yet it never has. Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going."

"A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience."

"The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next."

"“We in the Handdara don’t want answers. It’s hard to avoid them, but we try to.” “Faxe, I don’t think I understand.” “Well, we come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to ask.” “But you’re the Answerers!” “You don’t see, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?” “No—” “To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.”"

"Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. God speaks, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith."

"I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat."

"When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep."

"One voice, speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies, given time; plenty of time."

"No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year."

"I forgot, being too interested myself, that he’s a king, and does not see things rationally, but as a king."

"I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive."

"Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying."

"They prevented men from doing anything. But they did nothing themselves. They did not rule, they only blighted."

"Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them."

"It seemed, at least, that they had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies."

"We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God’s truth, the universe at once began to exist."

"The game must be played, and played their way, though they made all the rules and had all the skill. His ineptitude did not matter. His honesty did. He was staked now totally on one belief: that an honest man cannot be cheated, that truth, if the game be played through right to the end, will lead to truth."

"The juniper-scented liquor had volatilized his thoughts; he should be thinking that madness caused this man to call himself a king, but was thinking rather that kingship had driven this man mad."

"The more defensive a society, the more conformist."

"He liked the vast openness of sky and prairie, and found loneliness a pleasure with so immense a domain to be alone in."

"Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol twisted aside, and the lie come to be."

"We live well in the houses—well enough. But we are ruled utterly by fear. There was a time we sailed in ships between the stars, and now we dare not go a hundred miles from home. We keep a little knowledge, and do nothing with it. But once we used that knowledge to weave the pattern of life like a tapestry across night and chaos. We enlarged the chances of life. We did man’s work."

"Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger."

"He detested them for forcing helplessness upon him."

"Men who fight wars in Winter don’t live till Spring."

"All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens."