Quotes from Orson Scott Card

True implies that you have found a connection that exists independent of your apprehension of it, that would exist whether you noticed it or not.

You want to make me the best soldier possible. Go down and look at the standings. Look at the all-time standings. So far you're doing an excellent job with me. Congratulations. Now when are you going to put me up against a good army?' Graff's set lips turned to a smile, and he shook a little with silent laughter. Anderson handed Ender a slip of paper. 'Now,' he said.

If I had any part of you in me," said Han Fei-tzu, "I would not have needed to marry you to become a complete person.

could see or hear. That was what Alai had given him; a gift so sacred that even Ender could not be allowed

said Ender cheerfully.

humans will always act to preserve their own lives—except for the times when they don't.

I always tell what I believe. Whether it's true, I'm no more sure than any man.

Children couldn't stomach the truth, adults believed. Children had to be protected from the harsh realities of the world.

After twenty-five years of marriage, they could see each other clearly without having to look.

But it could wait until they got back. That was the nice thing about the past—it stayed right where you put it until you needed to pick it up again.

Living men forget the lessons of the past. But the ancestors never forget.

She could see his reasoning. Or rather, his unreasoning. He could win all he wanted, but he knew in his heart that there was always someone who could destroy him. … "You don't understand", he said. "Yes I do." "No you don't. I don't want to beat Peter." "Then what do you want?" "I want him to love me.

but your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing

There were not enough women among them, but they began to work out social patterns that would maximize reproduction and keep from having too many males without a hope of mating. Within a generation or two, if babies came in the usual proportions, half male and half female, the normal human pattern of monogamy could be restored.

So quickly does nationalism surface in the heart of a man who thought he was above such tribalism.

Americans were all farmers and shopkeepers at heart....

Isaac Asimov's Foundation

The enemy may outgun us, but they will never outthink us.

The Russians stopped being the bad guys back in the twentieth century!

I don't understand people who don't like their pictures taken," said Spunky. "If you can go out in public wearing your face, then how can it bother you for somebody to take a picture of that face?

Their explanations might have been completely legitimate, or they might have been sesquipedalian bushwa.

the war that will come now is every bit as bloody." "But you delayed it a few more years," said Verily. "What good is that?" "It's two or three more years of life. Of loving and marrying and having babies. Of buying and selling, of plowing and planting and harvesting, of moving and settling. It will be a different world in two or three years, and those who die in the war will have had that much more life. It's not a small thing, those years.

No, to understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story—what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That's the story that we never know, the story that we never can know—and yet, at the time of death, it's the only story truly worth telling.

Slavery, that was a kind of alchemy for such White folk, or so they reckoned. They calculated a way of turning each bead of a Black man's sweat into gold and each moan of despair from a Black woman's throat into the sweet clear sound of a silver coin ringing on the money-changer's table. There was buying and selling of souls in that place. Yet there was nary a one of them who understood the whole price they paid for owning other folk.