Quotes from Orson Scott Card

The devil takes his victories," the man replied, "wherever men of God lose heart, and leave the field to him.

For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.

Ender's anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo's was hot, and so it used him.

Peter had even named it once, when he said that he could always see what other people hated most about themselves, and bully them, while Val could always see what other people liked best about themselves, and flatter them.

Then they, too, lay down on mattresses stuffed with straw, hearing the music of the flies to buzz them to sleep, holding each other's hands as they dozed, thinking of the miracles by which love works its will in the world.

No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.

If there were no goodness in people, mankind would still be confined to loping across a Savannah somewhere on Earth, watching the elephants rule, or some other more compassionate species.

A non-materialist. And yet you are unpleasantly fat. A gluttonous ascetic? Such a contradiction.

We live in a time when moderates are treated worse than extremists, being punished as if they were more fanatical than the actual fanatics.

Child-rearing today was so complicated. You always had to think of what they'd say on television later.

Sickness and healing are in every heart. Death and deliverance are in every hand.

For now that they could not be together, they must be infinitely apart, and what had been sure and unshakable was now fragile and insubstantial; from the moment we are not together, Alai is a stranger, for he has a life now that will be no part of mine, and that means that when I see him we will not know each other.

Just one more example of why a commander who ruled by fear and made all the decisions himself would always be beaten, sooner or later.

The humans build their stupid fence to keep us out, but that is nothing. The sky is our fence!" Human leapt upward—startlingly high, for his legs were powerful. "Look how the fence throws me back down to the ground!

To a man with only a hammer, a screw is a defective nail.

So this is love, he said to himself, trying to examine his own overwhelming feelings with the rational fragment of his mind. This is the powerful, horrible longing that made Mother marry that miserable tyrant I had to call Father. How many unbelievably stupid heroes in stories did insanely dangerous things because they were in love? More to the pint, how many insane things am I going to do because of it?

The bones are hard and by themselves seem dead and stony, but by rooting into and pulling against the skeleton, the rest of the body carries out all the motions of life.

There are hundreds of possible causes for every effect, and a hundred possible effects for every cause.

Scholars don't have blood flowing in their veins, said Hamlet. When they're wounded, they bleed logic, and when all of it is gone, their brains die, and they become ... soldiers.

Valentine went back to class without answering. 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 danger, no invasion could ever threaten the human race with annihilation. The most noble title any child can have, Demosthenes wrote, is Third.

A man always assumes that others are as virtuous as himself

What about this? A colony of nothing but Battle School grads. If they bred true, they'd be the smartest military minds in the galaxy. Then they'd come home and take over Earth. OK, not that.

There are rules to everything, even if nobody made them up, even if nobody calls it a game. And if you want things to work out well, it's best to know the rules and only break them if you're playing a different game and following those rules.

Endurance, after all, was a kind of victory; a kind of heroism, too.