Orson Scott Card
Every day people judge all other people. The question is whether they judge wisely.Collection: People
I'm never impossible. The most I ever allow myself is to be somewhat unlikely.Collection: Impossible
Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.Collection: Happiness
It is a weak man who blames his failures on the strength of others.Collection: Men
You’re not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for the greater you are.Collection: Body
So let me tell you what I think about gods. I think a real god is not going to be so scared or angry that he tries to keep other people down…A real god doesn’t care about control. A real god already has control of everything that needs controlling. Real gods would want to teach you how to be just like them.Collection: Love
Faith doesn't mean you never doubt. It only means you never act upon your doubts.Collection: Mean
There's a sort of rage a man feels when he's been deceived where he most trusted. It compares to no other anger.Collection: Heartbreak
Only stupid men trying to seem smart need to be with dumb women. Only weak men trying to look strong are attracted to compliant women.Collection: Strong
She remembered the story from her childhood, about Adam and Eve in the garden, and the talking snake. Even as a little girl she had said - to the consternation of her family - What kind of idiot was Eve, to believe a snake? But now she understood, for she had heard the voice of the snake and had watched as a wise and powerful man had fallen under its spell. Eat the fruit and you can have the desires of your heart. It's not evil, it's noble and good. You'll be praised for it. And it's delicious.Collection: Girl
Whenever the law gets its hands on you, those who use the law to their own advantage will also turn it against you. Don't put your trust in the laws of men, Alvin. They were designed by strong men to improve their power over weaker ones.Collection: Strong
So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.Collection: Hypocrisy
Oops, I thought. Oops is an all-purpose word standing for every bit of profanity, blasphemy, and pornographic and scatological execration I could think of.Collection: Thinking
Sometimes happiness consists of finding the right balance of misery.Collection: Balance
Sometimes you have to trust people enough to let them succeed and love them enough to let them fail.Collection: Life
It is the downfall of evil, that it never sees far enough ahead.Collection: Evil
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.Collection: Writing
We have to go. I'm almost happy here.Collection: Happiness
A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.Collection: Degrees
Music isn't just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It's a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it's joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort in grief. Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes through music? How, then, could I be so ungrateful as to refuse the message?Collection: Grief
Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we WERE there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That's the truth - what is, what was, what will be - not what could be, what should have been, what never can be.Collection: Stars
I looked for perfection, and I found something better.Collection: Perfection
Isn’t that what it means to be civilized? That you can wait to get what you want?Collection: Mean
Let's fly away and live foreverCollection: Forever
Parents always make their worst mistakes with their oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.Collection: Funny
Sometimes good people have to do terrible things.Collection: People
Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.Collection: Community
Even the most introverted person alive is constantly hungry for human associationCollection: Alive
Most victories came from instantly exploiting your enemy's stupid mistakes, and not from any particular brilliance in your own plan.Collection: Mistake
The only true vision comes not from God but from the inmost recesses of the human mind.Collection: Mind
A man who can't read only knows what other folks tell him.Collection: Men
It is a common trait of primates to become submissive and even worshipful toward one who has the power to kill them.Collection: Common
Like running the hurdles. Work so hard, jump over every one, fast, high enough but no higher, because you can't afford to hang in the air. And then, when the race is over, you're dripping with sweat, either they beat you or you beat them ... and then a couple of guys come out and move the hurdles out of the way. Turns out they were nothing. All that work to jump over them, but now they're gone.Collection: Running
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?Collection: Jobs
People above you, they never want to share power with you. Why you look to them? They give you nothing. People below you, you give them hope, you give them respect, they give you power, cause they don't think they have any, so they don't mind giving it up.Collection: Thinking
Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart.Collection: Heart
I stole their future from them; I can only being to repay by seeing what I can learn from their past.Collection: Past
In a way she actually preferred Peter to other people because of this. He always acted out of intelligent self-interest.Collection: Intelligent
I have hope for you, if only because you're the only one left to hope for.Collection: Having Hope
When you walk on the face of a world, then forgiveness comes.Collection: World
I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love.Collection: Long
So I want to ask you a hypothetical question. My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind.Collection: Naps
If the other fellow can't tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn't trying to kill you.Collection: Trying
That was interesting, to find that it wasn't hunger that caused children to become bullies on the street. The bulliness was already in the child, and whatever the stakes were, they would find a way to act as they needed to act. … Intelligence and education, which all these children had, apparently didn't make any important difference in human nature.Collection: Children
I have to win this now, and for all time, or I’ll fight it every day and it will get worse and worse.Collection: Fighting
With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were their words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.Collection: Men
Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender.Collection: Race
It's easy to manipulate your children when they're absolutely sure you're stupid.Collection: Children
You killed more people than anybody in history." "Be the best at whatever you do, that's what my mother always told me.Collection: Mother