Quotes from Orson Scott Card

That was interesting, to find that it wasn't hunger that caused children to become bullies on the street. The bulliness was already in the child, and whatever the stakes were, they would find a way to act as they needed to act. … Intelligence and education, which all these children had, apparently didn't make any important difference in human nature.

The most noble title any child can have, Demosthenes wrote, is third.

A good working definition of fanaticism is that you are so convinced of your views and policies that you are sure that anyone who opposed them must be either stupid and decieved or have some ulterior motive. We are today a nation where almost everyone in the public eye displays fanaticism with every utterance.

Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.

I've had your tears with mine, and you've had mine with yours. I think that's more intimate even than a kiss.

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

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

Thanks from keeping me from being a liar, said Nikolai. What? About your having diarrhea. For you I'd get dysentery. Now that's friendship.

Sometimes good people have to do terrible things.

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.

the thing with brothers is, you're supposed to take turns being the keeper. Sometimes you get to sit down and be the brother who is kept.

Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we WERE there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That's the truth - what is, what was, what will be - not what could be, what should have been, what never can be.

Sister Carlotta, I'm on a leave of absence right now. That means I've been sacked, in case you don't understand how the I.F. handles these things." Sacked! A miscarriage of justice. You ought to be shot.

Everything we do means something, Ender realized. Them laughing. Me not laughing. He toyed with the idea of trying to be like the other boys. But he couldn't think of any jokes, and none of theirs seemed funny. Wherever their laughter came from, Ender couldn't find such a place in himself.

You can't rule out the impossible, because you never know which of your assumptions about what was possible might turn out, in the real universe, to be false.

It's easy to manipulate your children when they're absolutely sure you're stupid.

It is possible to have words come to your mind, and still refrain from speaking them aloud.

I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore.

Let's fly away and live forever

Love is random; fear is inevitable.

You frighten me, when you say there isn't time. I don't see why. Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia. But it keeps not ending. So far, so good.

For the first time in his life, a teacher was pointing out things that Ender had not already seen for himself. For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.

Two sides of the same coin, but which side is which?

Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality.