Ethan Wyeth: I hope you're thirsty." Gideon Wyeth:"Why?" Ethan: "Cause your dumb and ugly, but I can do something about thirsty.

Parents always make their worst mistakes with their oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.

The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life. But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong — for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.

Ender didn't like fighting. He didn't like Peter's kind, the strong against the weak, and he didn't like his own kind either, the smart against the stupid.

Science Fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees.

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.

Come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us. Blossom, trees; ripen, fields; be warm for them, suns; be fertile for them, planets: they are our adopted daughters, and they have come home.