Life & Wisdom Quote by Ursula K. Le Guin

A good insult can be disguised as advice, and Le Guin’s line lands that way: a cool dismissal of the entire frame, not the person inside it. “There are no right answers to wrong questions” refuses the comforting fantasy that better effort, better data, better sincerity will rescue a flawed premise. It’s a scalpel aimed at the category mistake: when the question is rigged, too narrow, or morally warped, the “right” answer becomes a kind of collaboration.

The intent is quietly insurgent. Le Guin spent a career building worlds that reveal how language and power co-produce each other: who gets to name, who gets to ask, what counts as “reasonable.” Her point isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-trap. A wrong question can be wrong because it smuggles in assumptions (“Which side deserves to win?”), limits the imaginable (“How do we make this system slightly less cruel?”), or treats people as problems to be solved (“What should we do with them?”). Answering such questions politely can launder their premises into legitimacy.

The subtext is also a writer’s warning. Narrative itself is made of questions, and the questions you choose determine the universe you can see. Le Guin is nudging readers toward a harder skill than argument: reframing. The most radical move is often to reject the menu entirely.

Context matters because Le Guin wrote against the grain of Cold War binaries, technocratic certainty, and genre conventions that pretended politics were optional. Her sentence is a small manifesto for intellectual self-defense: when the conversation is built to corner you, the honest answer is to change the conversation.