Sometimes you have to trust people enough to let them succeed and love them enough to let them fail.

Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me—to find out what you're good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools.

His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life.

There was no doubt now in Ender's mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no one would save him from it. Peter might be scum, but Peter had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.

Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you.

If you listen very carefully, you can hear the good fairy come in the night and leave our assignment for tomorrow.

The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.