Quotes from Orson Scott Card

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

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.

Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.

As a species, we have evolved to survive. And the way we do it is by straining and straining and, at last, every few generaitons, giving brith to genius. The one who invents the wheel. And light. And flight. The one who builds a city, a nation, an empire...I'll put it bluntly. Human beings are free excpet when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me - to find out what you're good for.

Your trust in rationality makes you irrational.

Do you know why Satan is so angry all the time? Because whenever he works a particularly clever bit of mischief God uses it to serve his own Rigteous purposes. So God uses wicked people as his tools? God gives us the freedom to to do great evil, if we choose, then He uses his own freedom to create goodness out of that evil, for that is what He chooses. So, in the long run, God always wins? Yes, in the short run though it can be uncomfortable.

The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.

The society whose citizens are willing to stand and fight is the one with the best chance of surviving long enough for history to even notice.

I have to win this now, and for all time, or I'll fight it every day and it will get worse and worse.

So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.

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.

What am I now, Alai? Still good. At what? At--anything. There's a million soldiers who'd follow you to the end of the universe. I don't want to go to the end of the universe. So where do you want to go? They'll follow you. I want to go home, thought Ender, but I don't know where it is.

Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.

What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never know why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even know themselves. Nobody understands anybody.

There was no doubt now in Ender's mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no on ewould 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.

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

Then you're dead, too, sweet little sister.' Oh, yes,' said Valentine. 'They'll believe that. I didn't know it would kill Andrew. And when he was dead, I didn't know it will kill Valentine too.

Nobodys life ever goes according to plan. So why do we keep on planning? Because that's how we know who we are. By what we intend to be. By what we try to become. And fail. I don't say 'fail'. I saw we aim and miss. But we still hit something.

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

Miro, I'm so sorry. I always felt such pity for you humans because you could only think of one thing at a time and your memories were so imperfect and . . . now I realize that just getting through the day without killing somebody can be an achievement. It gets to be a habit. Most of us manage to keep our body count quite low. It's the neighborly way to live.

We've devoted our lives to learning about them! Miro said. Ender stopped. Not from them.

If desire did not dim the brain, nobody would ever get married, drunk, or fat.

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

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