Orson Scott Card
Intellectual understanding does not always bring visceral belief.Collection: Understanding
I don't hate you, I love you, you're part of myself, you're my heart and when you go it's my heart torn out and carried away--Collection: Hate
He is dangerous, he is beautiful, I could drown in his understanding.Collection: Beautiful
Poke gave him life. Ender gave it meaning.Collection: Ender
The criminal misuse of time was pointing out the mistakes. Catching them―noticing them―that was essential. If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement. The part of the man's statement that was true, however, was about the uselessness of speaking up. If I know that the teacher is wrong, and say nothing, then I remain the only one who knows, and that gives me an advantage over those who believe the teacher.Collection: Teacher
Two sides of the same coin, but which side is which?Collection: Two Sides
I own the whole world, and folks haven't been keeping up too well on the payments.Collection: World
I don't know why people who got what they need to be happy don't just go ahead and be happy.Collection: People
I think that a good person can sometimes do wrong out of ignorance or weakness or wrong thinking, but when hard times come, the goodness wins out after all. And a bad person can often seem good and trustworthy for a long time, but when hard times come, the evil in him gets revealed.Collection: Ignorance
Rumors are the sauce of a dry life.Collection: Rumor
Science isn't done by consensus. It's done by rigorous testing.Collection: Done
When you really know someone, you can't hate him.Collection: Hate
There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good,' to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.Collection: Community
Debased men, but they all had something in common: They showed a keen regard for virtue, and tried to dress themselves in that costume. Hypocrisy, for all its bad reputation, at least showed a decent respect for goodness.Collection: Men
How clever of me. I have found such a pathway into hell that I can never get back out.Collection: Clever
Maybe that's all demons ever are. People like us, doing things without even knowing what we're doing.Collection: Knowing
Withholding a decision is a decision.Collection: Decision
I think you don't grow up until you stop worrying about other people's purposes or lack of them and find the purposes you believe in for yourself.Collection: Growing Up
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.Collection: Love You
If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement.Collection: Ignorance
If human beings are all monsters, why should I sacrifice anything for them?" "Because they are beautiful monsters..., And when they live in a network of peace and hope, when they trust the world and their deepest hungers are fulfilled, then within that system, that delicate web, there is joy. That is what we live for, to bind the monsters together, to murder their fear and give birth to their beauty.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Mean
Good people aren't good because they never cause harm to others. They're good because they treat others the best way they know how, with the understanding that they have.Collection: People
I'm not stupid!" In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.Collection: Stupid
It's what I was born for, isn't it? If I don't go, why am I alive?Collection: Alive
Then you're dead, too, sweet little sister.' Oh, yes,' said Valentine. 'They'll believe that. "I didn't know it would kill Andrew. And when he was dead, I didn't know it will kill Valentine too.Collection: Sweet
You're like, both like, Alexander the Great.' We can't both be Alexander.' Well sometimes I think you're two side of the same coin, and I'm the metal in between.Collection: Thinking
If I wanted to doubt, then I could doubt endlessly, but at some point a person has to stop questioning and act, and at that point you have to trust something to be true. You have to act as if something is true, and so you choose the thing you have the most reason to believe in, you have to live in the world that you have the most hope in.Collection: Believe
It is easy to say that you can adopt the whole human race as your children, but it is not the same as living in a home with a child and shaping all you do to help him learn to be happy and whole and good. Don't live your life without ever holding a child in your arms, on your lap, in your home, and feeling a child's arms around you and hearing his voice in your ear and seeing his smile, given to you because you put it into your heart.Collection: Children
Mazer, i don't want to keep dreaming these things. I'm afraid to sleep. I keep thinking of things i don't want to remember. My whole life keeps playing out as if i were a recorder and someone else wanted to watch the most terrible parts of my lifeCollection: Dream
Take me home, he said silently to Graff. In my dream you said you loved me. Take me homeCollection: Dream
Nobody ever completely means what they say. Even when they think they're telling the truth, there's always something hidden behind their words.Collection: Mean
Humanity does not ask to be happy.It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, and then happiness as we can manage it... Take what pleasure you can in the interstices of your work, , but your work is first, learning first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.Collection: Ambition
He’d undone all he could. You can be sorry, and you can be forgiven, but you can’t call back the futures that your bad decisions lostCollection: Sorry
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.Collection: Strong
because if you can’t kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.Collection: Enders Game
Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive.” “That’s a lie.” “No. It’s just a half truth. You can worry about the other half after we win this war.Collection: War
Your ego-depletion seems problematically difficult to assuage.Collection: Ego
Whoop-de-do," said Ram. "What?" "I'm celebrating." "Was that irony or loss of mental function?" asked the expendable. "Was that a rhetorical questions, a bit of humor, or a sign that you are losing confidence in me?" "I have no confidence in you, Ram," said the expendable. "Well, thanks." "You're welcome.Collection: Thank You
All is going well, very well, I couldn’t ask for anything better— So why do I hate my life?Collection: Hate
Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn’t hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.Collection: Hurt
As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what “just living” might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.Collection: Done
I've had your tears with mine, and you've had mine with yours. I think that's more intimate even than a kiss.Collection: Kissing
This is the Speaker for the Dead? Judging someone by appearances?" "Maybe I've fallen in love with Grego." "You've always been a sucker for people who pee on you.Collection: People
The univers is statistically more likely to be ironic than not.Collection: Ironic
Come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us. Blossom, trees; ripen, fields; be warm for them, suns; be fertile for them, planets: they are our adopted daughters, and they have come home.Collection: Daughter
With life. Rooter says that life is how God gives purpose to the universe.Collection: Giving
The problem with elections is that anybody who wants an office badly enough to run for it probably shouldn’t have it. And anybody who does not want an office badly enough to run for it probably shouldn’t have it, either. Government office should be received like a child’s Christmas present, with surprise and delight. Instead it is usually received like a diploma, an anticlimax that never seems worth the struggle to earn it.Collection: Running
History is an omlette. THe eggs are already broken.Collection: Eggs