QuoteProject
You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.
Ursula K. Le Guin
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Helping others is essential, but one must recognize the limits of their authority and understanding.

Ursula K. Le Guin emphasizes the importance of helping others while also cautioning against the arrogance that can come from believing one has all the answers. She suggests that genuine assistance requires not only good intentions but also a clarity of understanding and the awareness of the complexity of human needs, reminding us that true guidance should not come from a place of superiority or presumption.

Themes

Helping OthersAuthorityUnderstandingGood Intentions

In practice

Example use cases

During a community meeting about social services, this quote could be used to highlight the importance of careful consideration when offering help.

More from Ursula K. Le Guin

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
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.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
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.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
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.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
Ursula K. Le GuinRead

Similar quotes

Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time.
Victor HugoRead
A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead
What am I? Do I know? I am a man: quite simply, a 'breather.'
Marcel DuchampRead
Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.
Noam ChomskyRead
When thinking about the future, it is fashionable to be pessimistic. Yet the evidence unequivocally belies such pessimism. Over the past centuries, humanity's lot has improved dramatically - in the developed world, where it is rather obvious, but also in the developing world, where life expectancy has more than doubled in the past 100 years.
Bjorn LomborgRead
Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.
Anne SextonRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.