# Quote — Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

> As we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world’s summer: this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life.

- Author: [Ursula K. Le Guin](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ursula-k-le-guin.md)
- Book: [The Wind’s Twelve Quarters](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ursula-k-le-guin/the-winds-twelve-quarters.md)
- Page: 255
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin#The_Wind%E2%80%99s_Twelve_Quarters_(1975)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/ursula-k-le-guin/the-winds-twelve-quarters/as-we-did

## More from this book

> The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.

p. 254 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ursula-k-le-guin/the-winds-twelve-quarters/the-trouble-is-that.md)

> No granite is so hard as hatred and no clay so cold as cruelty.

p. 204 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ursula-k-le-guin/the-winds-twelve-quarters/no-granite-is-so-hard.md)

> Hughes, who had entered the space program from astrophysics, came with a very good record, in fact a brilliant one. This troubled many of his military superiors, to whom high intelligence was a code word for instability and insubordination.

p. 228 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ursula-k-le-guin/the-winds-twelve-quarters/hughes-who-had.md)