It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.
Interpretation
Ownership can lead to crime, as laws create boundaries that some may seek to break.
This quote by Ursula K. Le Guin suggests that the concepts of ownership and legality can inherently create conditions for crime. When individuals feel ownership, it may foster a desire to protect what they own, potentially leading to theft or conflict. Moreover, laws themselves can provoke disobedience; thus, by establishing rules, society may unintentionally encourage criminal behavior.
In practice
In a discussion about property laws and their implications on crime rates.
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. βDo they expect students not to be anarchists?β he said. βWhat else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.
A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.
More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.
Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.
A person is an individual substance of a rational nature.
I am Charles Mingus, half black man, not even white enough to pass for nothing but black. I am Charles Mingus, a famed jazzman, but not famed enough to make a living in this society.
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