Orson Scott Card Quotes

I don't care if I pass your test, I don't care if I follow your rules. If you can cheat, so can I. I won't let you beat me unfairly - I'll beat you unfairly first. - Ender

Maybe she couldn't know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.

I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.

If the other fellow can't tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn't trying to kill you.

Don’t win loyalty, just obedience, and only while the lash is in the room.

Some men are great enough that they can love a whole woman, and not just part of her.

I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.

Reasonable argument is impossible when authority becomes the arbiter.

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.

The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win.

A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.

Where loyalty bound creatures together, they became something larger, something new and whole and inexplicable.

The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.

Let me be loved like that, by a man who will not replace me with concubines when I'm old and ugly. Let me be loved by a man who loves God more than me.

Thank God for you, Ender. Thank God.

Once you get a brother, you don’t give him up easy.

Good people can't out-think evil, cause evil thinks of things good folks can't think of.

How short life is for fools.

I didn't want to see you." "They told me." "I was afraid that I'd still love you." "I hoped that you would.

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

The only way to learn is by changing your mind.

Satanic Verses is a despicable book that could not have been written by a person who wished to behave decently and responsibly.

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 world was full of locked doors, and he had to get his hand on every key.

Evil people naturally assume that you will use that power exactly as they would use it.

Order and disorder', said the speaker, 'they each have their beauty.

My father always said that government is like watching another man piss in your boot. Someone feels better but it certainly isn't you.

I don't care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won't get you out of this school.

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

Maybe that's all demons ever are. People like us, doing things without even knowing what we're doing.

What a waste of time to be posthumously famous.

When you walk on the face of a world, then forgiveness comes.

Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone you love is a hostage, sapping your courage and corrupting your judgment.

Human: That's stupid. Isn't there grass on both sides?

I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares.

Aw, Poke, you poor, kind, decent, stupid girl. You saved me and I let you down.

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

He loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.

That's the problem with winning right from the start, thought Ender. you lose friends.

And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?

You’re not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for the greater you are.

I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there.

With life. Rooter says that life is how God gives purpose to the universe.

Religion is tied to the deepest feelings people have. The love that arises from that stewing pot is the sweetest and strongest, but the hate is the hottest, and the anger is the most violent.

It will hurt." said Petra. "But let's make the most of what we have, and not let future pain ruin present happiness.

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

Sometimes happiness consists of finding the right balance of misery.

a lot of human behavior was really acting out our responses to dangers long past.

I have hope for you, if only because you're the only one left to hope for.