Quotes from Orson Scott Card

We all act because we're sure of what we want, and we believe that the actions we perform will get us what we want, but we never know anything for sure, and so all our rationales are invented to justify what we were going to do anyway before we thought of any reasons.

Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive.

It's all just fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward but they're never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach.

Children never do understand their own childishness.

True believers in a cause often behaved in self-defeating ways because they expected other people to see the rightness of their cause if they just stated it clearly enough. As a result, they tipped their hand in every game and couldn't understand why everyone ganged up against them.

If a tale we're reading or watching on screen is too familiar, it becomes boring; we know the end from the beginning and switch off the set or set the book aside. Yet if it is too unfamiliar, we reject the story as unbelievable or incomprehensible. We demand some strangeness, but not too much.

Umbo grimaced. "It would be just like him.

As far as the rest of the biosphere is concerned, we could be wiped out and it would adjust, it would get on with the next step in evolution. But humanity doesn't want to die. As a species, we have evolved to survive.

He was the most dangerous of men, because, in his actions, he saw only good. He saw himself as a hero.

Does this feel like heaven? She asked. He laughed, and not nicely. Well, then, you can't be dead. You forget, he said. This could easily be hell.

I wanted to learn what it was like to have a friend

The running joke was that at the graduation ceremony following their nine months of training, SAS graduates received the coveted tan beret in one hand and a broom in the other.

Whatever action you take must be the final action, for you'll get no second chance to surprise the same man.

And that, said Bean, is why losing is a much more powerful teacher than winning.

it's not unusual in history for the solution to one problem to become the root of the next one.

Speculative fiction includes all stories that take place in a setting contrary to known reality.

One is never too old to be a student of the enemy. I have learned from the buggers. You will learn from me.

The people in the King's city [...] thought that these highvalley folk lived like animals. But in truth these villagers lived pure human life. they needed each other to survive, and knew it. They had no conspiracies and no secrets, no ambitions and no feuds. They couldn't afford the luxury of treating any man or woman or child as expendable.

History is a chaotic system. The details can shift endlessly, but the overall shape remains constant. Make a small change in the past, and it changes enough details in the present that we would not have come together at exactly this place and time to watch exactly this scene. And yet the great movements of history would be largely unchanged.

Peter, pretending to take a crushed pea out of his nose

that the only people who ever prize purity of ignorance are those who profit from a monopoly on knowledge.

It's like those foolish attempts to control immigration to America based on the traits that were deemed desirable, when in fact the only trait that defines Americans historically is "descended from somebody willing to give up everything to live there." And we won't go into the way Australian colonists were selected!

What does it matter, to tell yourself that the thing controlling you comes from outside, if in fact you only experience it inside your own heart? Where can you run from it? How can you hide?

The pride of universal guilt. It's a form of vanity and egomania. She holds herself responsible for things that could not possibly be her fault. As if she controlled everything, as if other people's suffering came about as punishment for her sins.