“Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organise from the bottom up!”

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.

Wasn’t it immoral to do work you didn’t enjoy?

All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.

He was not working. He was being worked.

Life on Anarres had sealed him, closed off his soul; the waters of life welled all around him, and yet he could not drink.

You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

“You know, I don’t agree,” he said to long-faced Vokep, an agricultural chemist travelling to Abbenay. “I think men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women don’t have to learn.” Vokep shook his head grimly. “It’s the kids,” he said. “Having babies. Makes ’em propertarians. They won’t let go.” He sighed. “Touch and go, brother, that’s the rule.

It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.