Orson Scott Card Quotes

Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart.

But I fear that I also underestimate the stupidity of the rest of mankind. Are we absolutely sure that we ought to win this war?

Your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.

Who would I be, if other good souls did not make up for my shortcomings?

No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.

When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn't yet know that he needs your wisdom you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man.

That night Demosthenes published a scathing denunciation of the population limitation laws. People should be allowed to have as many children as they like, and the surplus population should be sent to other worlds, to spread mankind so far across the galaxy that no disaster, no invasion could ever threaten the human race with annihilation. "The most noble title any child can have," Demosthenes wrote, "is Third.

I don't believe that there are aliens. I believe there are really different people.

There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good,' to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.

Soldiers can sometimes make decisions that are smarter than the orders they've been given.

Human beings are free except when humanity needs them.

I love you Ender. More than ever. No matter what you decide.

Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.

An eye for an eye? How Christian of you.' Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians.

Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.

When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.

In a way she actually preferred Peter to other people because of this. He always acted out of intelligent self-interest.

Only stupid men trying to seem smart need to be with dumb women. Only weak men trying to look strong are attracted to compliant women.

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books.

I have lived in the only decades I could have lived in, and hope to live through at least a few more.

there were crimes and quarrels, alongside kindness and cooperation; there were people who loved each other and people who did not; it was a human world.

Home is anywhere that you know all your friends and all your enemies.

Madness, and then illumination.

But whether there's some grand design really matters little to me. My only hope was this: to see what might be, to believe that it should be, and then to do all I could to bring it to pass, whatever the cost.

Ender Wiggin must believe that no matter what happens, no adult will ever, ever step in to help him in any way.

As long as you keep getting born, it's alright to die some times.

Well, how do I know that they don't know the answer unless I ask?

Mazer, i don't want to keep dreaming these things. I'm afraid to sleep. I keep thinking of things i don't want to remember. My whole life keeps playing out as if i were a recorder and someone else wanted to watch the most terrible parts of my life

I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.

Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't the will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never cease to exist.

The priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make.

There was no name for the disease; his body had gone insane, forgotten the blueprint by which human beings were built. Even now the disease still lives on in his children. Not in our bodies, but in our souls. We exist where normal human children are expected to be; we're even shaped the same. But each of us in our own way has been replaced by an imitation child, shaped out of a twisted, fetid, lipidous goiter that grew out of Father's soul.

I stole their future from them; I can only being to repay by seeing what I can learn from their past.

He could see Bonzo's anger growing hot. Hot anger was bad. Ender's anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo's was hot, and so it used him.

There's no need to legalize gay marriage. I have plenty of gay friends who are committed couples; some of them call themselves married, some don't, but their friends treat them as married. Anybody who doesn't like it just doesn't hang out with them.

. . . All these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.

'I could kill you like this,' Peter whispered. 'Just press and press until you're dead'.

Science isn't done by consensus. It's done by rigorous testing.

With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were their words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.

But if you caught my informant,' said Achilles, 'why in the world would Chamrajnagar—or Graff, if it was him—launch the shuttle anyway? Was catching me doing something naughty so important they’d risk a shuttle and it’s crew just to catch me? I find that quite… flattering. Sort of like winning the Nobel Prize for scariest villain.

No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing.

Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.

It's what I was born for, isn't it? If I don't go, why am I alive?

He is dead, she thought bitterly, because we have forgotten him.

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day.

Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.

The only way to retrieve a secret,once known, is to replace it with a lie.

Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.