Dispossessed

Spent a good chunk of yesterday reading Ursula Le Guin's Dispossessed. Great book, with some quotable passages:

He looked up at them, one face after another. They all looked at him, expectant. 'Well, you have me,' he said. He smiled. 'You have your anarchist. What are you going to do with him?'

'...Well, so I came to begin to change that.'
'Entirely on your own initiative,' said Oiie.
'It is the only initiative I acknowledge,' Shevek said, smiling, in dead earnest.

He knew now what they had done with him. Chifoilisk had told him the same fact. They owned him. He had thought to bargain with them, a very anarchist's notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

'My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.'