Quotes from Orson Scott Card

If you give orders and explain nothing, you might get obedience, but you'll get no creativity. If you tell them your purpose, then when your original plan is shown to be faulty, they'll find another way to achieve your goal. Explaining to your men doesn't weaken their respect for you, it proves your respect for them.

The enemy gate is down.

None of us could be happy for long, doing nothing.

Sickness and healing are in every heart; death and deliverance in every hand.

If you listen very carefully, you can hear the good fairy come in the night and leave our assignment for tomorrow.

What else should you be? Human beings didn't evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing's the first thing we learned. And a good thing we did, or we'd be dead, and the tigers would own the earth.

Be proud, Bonito, pretty boy. You can go home and tell your father, Yes, I beat up Ender Wiggin, who was barely ten years old, and I was thirteen. And I had only six of my friends to help me, and somehow we managed to defeat him, even though he was naked and wet and alone--Ender Wiggin is so dangerous and terrifying it was all we could do not to bring two hundred.

It's as if every conversation with a woman was a test, and men always failed it, because they always lacked the key to the code and so they never quite understood what the conversation was really about.

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 disaster, no invasion could ever threaten the human race with annihilation. The most noble title any child can have, Demosthenes wrote, is Third.

The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.

I'm not stupid! In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.

Why else do we read fiction, anyway? Not to be impressed by somebody's dazzling language - or at least I hope that's not our reason. I think that most of us read these stories that we know are not 'true' because we're hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story.

Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you.

In order to learn, one must change one's mind.

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

An eye for an eye? How Christian of you.' Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians.

Thank you for this, Peter. For dry eyes and silent weeping. You taught me how to hide anything I felt. More than ever, I need that now.

The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.

Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you.

We need a Napoleon. An Alexander. Except that Napoleon lost in the end, and Alexander flamed out and died young. We need a Julius Caesar, except that he made himself a dictator, and died for it.

That's what so many people didn't understand about life. The real world is the one within the walls of homes; the outside world, of careers and politics and money and fame, that was the fake world, where nothing lasted, and things were real only to the extent they harmed or helped people inside their homes.

Faith doesn't mean that you never doubt. It only means that you never act upon your doubts.

Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender.

Science Fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees.