Orson Scott Card Quotes

With "gay marriage," the last shreds of meaning will be stripped away from marriage, with homosexuals finishing what faithless, selfish heterosexuals have begun.
Orson Scott Card
Eko brushed a tear from her eye, and Immo jeered at her, but father held up a hand. "Never mock a tender heart," he said.
Orson Scott Card
I can see by your face that I'll never persuade you. And that's surprising, because usually you at least try to see my side."I can see your side," said Cecily. "I've got a much clearer view of it than you do, from over here on my side.
Orson Scott Card
He was not prepared to deal with my mistake, thought Jane, and he did not understand the suffering his response would cause me. He is innocent of wrong -doing, and so am I. We shall forgive each other and go on. It was a good decision, and Jane was proud of it. The trouble was, she couldn't carry it out. Those few seconds in which parts of her mind came to a halt were not trivial in their effect on her. There was trauma, loss, change; she was not now the same being that she had been before. parts of her had died. Parts of her had become confused, out of order...She discovered, as many a living being had discovered, that rational decisions are far more easily made than carried out.
Orson Scott Card
We are wise to be cautious, but I suggest we prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
Orson Scott Card
Never take another human being to the third life, because we don't know how to go.
Orson Scott Card
In America, film is the highest form of art that the public aspires to. People will come to me and say ‘Oh, your book was so good, they ought to make a movie out of it!’ To which I reply ‘Well, why? It’s already a book.
Orson Scott Card
Ender began to eat, slowly and carefully, pretending not to notice he was the center of attention.
Orson Scott Card
I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! You didn't want me, you bastards, you wanted Peter, but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!
Orson Scott Card
That's what Father and Mother are, thought Nafai. They stay together, not because of any gain, but because of the gift. Father doesn't stay with Mother because she is good for him, but rather because together they can do good for us, and for many others.
Orson Scott Card
Ender didn't like fighting. He didn't like Peter's kind, the strong against the weak, and he didn't like his own kind either, the smart against the stupid.
Orson Scott Card
If you can cheat, so can I. I won't let you beat me unfairly - I'll beat you unfairly first.
Orson Scott Card
A minor request," said Mazer. "Let's not refer to it as the training cage. 'Training' sounds laborious and regimented. Soldiers groan at the word. These men joined the IF to fight, sir. Let's call it the Battle Room.
Orson Scott Card
My mind, my logical, practical, reasoning mind, is peeing in his mind pants.
Orson Scott Card
To a man with only a hammer, a screw is a defective nail.
Orson Scott Card
Issib wasn't thrilled to see him. I'm busy and don't need interruptions." "This is the household library," said Nafai. "This is where we always come to do research." "See? You're interrupting already." "Look, I didn't say anything, I just came in here, and you started picking at me the second I walked in the door." "I was hoping you'd walk back out." "I can't. Mother sent me here." Nafai walked over behind Issib, who was floating comfortably in the air in front of his computer display. It was layered thirty pages deep, but each page had only a few words on it, so he could see almost everything at once. Like a game of solitaire, in which Issib was simply moving fragments from place to place. The fragments were all words in weird languages. The ones Nafai recognized were very old. "What language is that?" Nafai asked pointing, to one. Issib signed. "I'm so glad you're not interrupting me." "What is it, some ancient form of Vijati?" "Very good. It's Slucajan, which came from Obilazati, the original form of Vijati. It's dead now." "I read Vijati, you know." "I don't." "Oh, so you're specializing in ancient, obscure languages that nobody speaks anymore, including you?" "I'm not learning these languages, I'm researching lost words." "If the whole language is dead, then all the words are lost." "Words that used to have meanings, but that died out or survived only in idiomatic expressions. Like 'dancing bear.' What's a bear, do you know?" "I don't know. I always thought it was some kind of graceful bird." "Wrong. It's an ancient mammal. Known only on Earth, I think, and not brought here. Or it died out soon. It was bigger than a man, very powerful. A predator." "And it danced?" "The expression used to mean something absurdly clumsy. Like a dog walking on its hind legs." "And now it means the opposite. That's weird. How could it change?" "Because there aren't any bears. THe meaning used to be obvious, because everybody knew a bear and how clumsy it would look, dancing. But when the bears were gone, the meaning could go anywhere. Now we use it for a person who's extremely deft in getting out of an embarrassing social situation. It's the only case that we use the word bear anymore. And you see a lot of people misspelling it, too." "Great stuff. You doing a linguistics project?" "No." "What's this for, then?" "Me." "Just collection old idioms?" "Lost words." "Like bear? The word isn't lost, Issya. It's the bears that are gone." "Very good, Nyef. You get full credit for the assignment. Go away now.
Orson Scott Card
Do not be disingenuous with me, Colonel Graff. Americans are quite apt at playing stupid when they choose to, but I am not to be deceived.
Orson Scott Card
It was not about physical strength, Wit reminded himself. It was 90 percent mental, 10 percent physical. That's what the SEAL instructors were looking for: men and women who could disregard the pleadings of the body. Pain was nothing, sleep was nothing. What was chaffed skin, wrecked muscles, bleeding sores? The body chooses to be sore. The body chooses to be exhausted. But the SEAL mind rejects it. The SEAL mind commands the body, not the other way around.
Orson Scott Card
The only way to retrieve a secret,once known, is to replace it with a lie.
Orson Scott Card
What a waste of time to be posthumously famous.
Orson Scott Card
Mine mine mine. That was the curse and power of human beings—that what they saw and loved they had to have. They could share it with other people but only if they conceived of those people as being somehow their own. What we own is ours. What you own should also be ours. In fact, you own nothing, if we want it. Because you are nothing. We are the real people, you are only posing as people in order to try to deprive us of what God means us to have.
Orson Scott Card
If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make... So-- as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of hour behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down, one by one, then you can always say, look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of dominoes that can be traced back in an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to... Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society.
Orson Scott Card
Maybe that's all demons ever are. People like us, doing things without even knowing what we're doing.
Orson Scott Card
He committed the crime of stupidity while under my command," said Citizen."Oh my," said Rigg. "They're handing out the death penalty for that these days?
Orson Scott Card
Soldiers can sometimes make decisions that are smarter than the orders they've been given.
Orson Scott Card
There are miracles even reactivity can't pull off, Ender
Orson Scott Card
So I don't even get a chance to learn before I'm being judged.
Orson Scott Card
I need you to be clever, Bean. I need you to think of solutions to problems we haven't seen yet. I want you to try things that no one has ever tried because they're absolutely stupid.
Orson Scott Card
In my experience, influence is power.
Orson Scott Card
The have influence, but no power.""In my experience, influence is power.
Orson Scott Card
I want to see the king," I said, after explaining who I was."Wonderful," said the ancient Nkumai who sat on a cushion near the corner pole of the house. "I'm glad for you."That was all, and apparently he meant to say no more. "Why are you so glad?" I asked."Because it's good for every human being to have an unfulfilled wish. It makes all of life so poignant.
Orson Scott Card
Hive Queen: They never know anything. They don't have enough years in their little lives to come to an understanding of anything at all. And yet they think they understand. From earliest childhood, they delude themselves into thinking they comprehend the world, while all that's really going on is that they've got some primitive assumptions and prejudices. As they get older they learn a more elevated vocabulary in which to express their mindless pseudo- knowledge and bully other people into accepting their prejudices as if they were truth, but it all amounts to the same thing. Individually, human beings are all dolts.Pequenino: While collectively...Hive Queen: Collectively, they're a collection of dolts. But in all their scurrying around and pretending to be wise, throwing out idiotic half-understood theories about this and that, one or two of them will come up with some idea that is just a little bit closer to the truth than what was already known. And in a sort of fumbling trial and error, about half the time the truth actually rises to the top and becomes accepted by people who still don't understand it, who simply adopt it as a new prejudice to be trusted blindly until the next dolt accidentally comes up with an improvement.>Pequenino: So you're saying that no one is ever individually intelligent, and groups are even stupider than individuals-- and yet by keeping so many fools engaged in pretending to be intelligent, they still come up with some of the same results that an intelligent species would come up with.Hive Queen: Exactly.
Orson Scott Card
Nero, you are an example to all the children on this shuttle. Because most of them are so foolish, they think it is better to keep their stupidest thoughts to themselves. You, however, understand the profound truth that you must reveal your stupidity openly. To hold your stupidity inside you is to embrace it, to cling to it, to protect it. But when you expose your stupidity, you give yourself the chance to have it caught, corrected, and replaced with wisdom. Be brave, all of you, like Nero Boulanger, and when you have a thought of such surpassing ignorance that you think it's actually smart, make sure to make some noise, to let your mental limitations squeak out some whimpering fart of a thought, so that you have a chance to learn.
Orson Scott Card
And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?
Orson Scott Card
I'm not stupid!" In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.
Orson Scott Card
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.
Orson Scott Card
Don't make fun of me!" Ender said. "I'm afraid I'm going crazy.
Orson Scott Card
I'll become exactly the tool you want me to be, said Ender silently, but at least I wont be fooled into it. I'll do it because I choose to, not because you tricked me, you sly bastard.
Orson Scott Card
It had to be a trick or you couldn't have done it.
Orson Scott Card
You don't know what would have happened if I hadn't pushed. Nobody knows. I did it the way I did it, and it worked. Above all, it worked.
Orson Scott Card
In my dreams," said Ender, "I'm never sure whether I'm really me.
Orson Scott Card
So the whole war is beause we can't talk to each other.
Orson Scott Card
Nights were so real that days began to seem dreamlike to him
Orson Scott Card
As the doctor treated the wound, Mazer said, " I don't care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won't get you out of this school.
Orson Scott Card
The devil?” Jason heaved the tick over his shoulder like a collier with his sack. “Satan. The adversary. The enemy of the plan of God. The undoer. The destroyer. Yes. He definitely was.” Jason smiled. “But he meant well.
Orson Scott Card
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.
Orson Scott Card
I will remember this, thought Ender, when I am defeated. To keep dignity, and give honor where it's due, so that defeat is not disgrace. And I hope I don't have to do it often.
Orson Scott Card
We need you to help us figure out how you can help us.
Orson Scott Card
He thinks I'm like him, Mazer realized. That's what we do as humans; it's how we read minds. We assume that other people think like we do. So if we're nasty and suspicious and conniving we assume that everyone is as nasty and suspicious and conniving as we are.
Orson Scott Card
Guils is the greatest weapon vecause its cuts rarely heal and it aims for the heart
Orson Scott Card
Ender had come to feel a unity so strong that the word we came to his lips much more easily than I.
Orson Scott Card
Never believe a rumor of my death,' said Peter. 'I have as many lives as a cat. Also as many teeth, as many claws, and the same cheery, cooperative disposition.
Orson Scott Card
It made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise.
Orson Scott Card
He wasn't telling her what the gods were, he was telling her what goodness was. To want other people to grow. To want other people to have all the good things that you have. And to spare them the bad things if you can. That was goodness.
Orson Scott Card
A good commander, thought Ender, doesn't have to make stupid threats.
Orson Scott Card
Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.
Orson Scott Card
She likes us,” said Umbo. “I know, I could feel it too,” said Rigg. “She’s really glad to have us here. I think she loves us like her own children.” “Whom she murdered and cut up into the stew.” “They were delicious.
Orson Scott Card
It's a stupid leader who can't turn follower when somebody offers him a wiser course
Orson Scott Card
You deplore what I did, but you still want to know the results of my research.
Orson Scott Card
We pray for a messenger from God—who knows but what the messenger also prayed for a place to take his message?
Orson Scott Card