“To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.”

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

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

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.

All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners.

The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows.

The story is not in the plot but in the telling.

Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.

Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.

Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other–outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.

We read books to find out who we are.

All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge.

The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle.

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane.

If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.

Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel.

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.

He will soon be claiming that the Resistance has liberated the world.