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“No vote,” you say. It’s so quiet that you can hear water trickling out of the pipes in the communal pool, hundreds of feet below. “Leave. Go join Rennanis if they’ll have you. But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any other part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people.”

— The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth, #2)

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.

— The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (Hainish Cycle)

Earlier in this conference, Jill Paton Walsh suggested that in Tehanu, I was “doing penance.” Irredeemably secular, I’d call it affirmative action. In my lifetime as a writer, I have lived through a revolution, a great and ongoing revolution. When the world turns over, you can’t go on thinking upside down. What was innocence is now irresponsibility. Visions must be re-visioned.

— The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition (Earthsea Cycle) by Ursula K. Le Guin

The merchants of the Inner Isles, in their first joy at having a king and laws again to protect their trading, had set his revenue high and offered him yet more money for all such undertakings; for the first few years of his reign they had not even complained that taxation was destroying their business and would leave their children destitute.

— The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin (The Earthsea Cycle, #6)