Orson Scott Card
All the common people want is to be left alone. All the ordinary soldier wants is to collect his pay and not get killed. That's why the great forces of history can be manipulated by astonishingly small groups of determined people.Collection: People
Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone you love is a hostage, sapping your courage and corrupting your judgment.Collection: Courage
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.Collection: Real
Andrew said you were the best person he ever knew." "He reached that conclusion before he saw me raise three barbarian children to adulthood. I understand your mother has six." "Right." "And you're the oldest." "Yes." "That's too bad. Parents always make their worst mistakes with the 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: Mother
Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.Collection: Real
Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.Collection: Real
My own feeling is that human happiness is a very random thing, and bestows itself willy-nilly, and there's not much deserving about the matter.Collection: Feelings
You can't change what you don't understand.Collection: Acknowledge
Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child...Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence.Collection: Children
It's called civilization. Women invented it, and every time you men blow it all to bits, we just invent it again.Collection: Women
I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without itCollection: Pain
There was no doubt now in Ender's mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no one would save him from it. Peter might be scum, but Peter had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, 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: Pain
Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.Collection: Humanity
He's not a killer. He just wins... ThoroughlyCollection: Winning
Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality.Collection: Trying
Some men are great enough that they can love a whole woman, and not just part of her.Collection: Men
We're all trying to decide whether your scores up there are a miracle or a mistake." "A habit.Collection: Mistake
I have never resisted the lord in my life, and I never will. But I'm not so hungry for dialogue with him that I have to make up his part as well as my own.Collection: Religion
Whether he likes it or not, [he] cannot remain incognito forever. He has outraged too many wise men and pleased too many fools to hide behind his too-appropriate order to assume leadership of the forces of stupidity he has marshalled, or his enemies will unmask him in order to better understand the disease that has produced such a warped and twisted mind.Collection: Leadership
Never mind that the story had turned out to be lies and foolishness—there was always folks stupid enough to say, Where there's smoke there's fire, when the saying should have been, Where there's scandalous lies there's always malicious believers and spreaders-around, regardless of evidence.Collection: Lying
So the whole war is because we can't talk to each other.Collection: War
Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't the will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never cease to exist.Collection: Sacrifice
You accomplish exactly as much as the people who serve you decide you'll accomplish and nothing more.Collection: Leadership
From now on the enemy is more clever than you. From now on the enemy is stronger than you. From now on you are always about to lose.Collection: Clever
When have you ever seen someone who had no doubts who was also correct about anything?Collection: Doubt
Once you duct-tape a Ziploc bag to a man's chest, there's no going back.Collection: Men
Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.Collection: Life
But Father has also taught him: Treat a man as if he had a fine reputation to protect, and he will usually endeavor to deserve it.Collection: Father
He would always speak the language of the heart with an awkward foreign accent.Collection: Heart
There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.Collection: Writing
The funny thing was, you see, that Mike Fink didn't think of himself as a murderer. He thought of life as a contest, and dying was what happened to those who came out second best, but it wasn't the same as murder, it was a fair fight.Collection: Fighting
But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.Collection: Hate
You want to beat Peter?" she asked "No," he answered "Beat the buggers. Then come home and see who notices Peter Wiggen anymore. Look him in the eye when all the world loves and reveres you. That'll be defeat in his eyes, Ender, thats how you win" "You don't understand" he said "Yes i do" "No you don't. I don't want to beat Peter" "Then what do you want?" "I want him to love meCollection: Eye
The Maker is the one who is part of what he makes.Collection: Makers
Being young is an 18 year prison sentence for a crime your parents committed. But you do get time off for good behavior.Collection: Years
Remember, the enemy's gate is down.Collection: Enemy
This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.Collection: Life
If a pig goes upon the threshing-floor, or a field, or a garden, and the owner of the meadow, or the field, or the garden smites it so that it die, he shall give it back to its owner; but if he does not give it back, he becomes a thief.Collection: Garden
I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.Collection: Eye
The selective voluntary blindness of human beings allows them to ignore the moral consequences of their choices. It has been one of the species' most valuable traits, in terms of the survival of any particular human community.Collection: Choices
But whether there's some grand design really matters little to me. My only hope was this: to see what might be, to believe that it should be, and then to do all I could to bring it to pass, whatever the cost.Collection: Believe
The fear of death in the one place was not as strong as another kind of fear, the fear of a world gone crazy, a place where anything could happen, where nothing could be trusted, where nothing was certain. A terrible place.Collection: Strong
If anyone have intercourse with a pig or a dog, he shall die. If a man have intercourse with a horse or a mule, there is no punishment. But he shall not approach the king, and shall not become a priest... If a pig spring upon a man for intercourse, there is no punishment.Collection: Dog
There's only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore youCollection: Hate
Perhaps I'm hiding from myself. Perhaps I don't want to be what I'm supposed to be. Or perhaps I don't want to keep living the life I already started to live.Collection: Live Life
We spend our lives guessing at what's going on inside everybody else, and when we happen to get lucky and guess right, we think we 'understand.' Such nonsense. Even a monkey at a computer will type a word now and then.Collection: Thinking
Thank God for you, Ender. Thank God.Collection: Thank God
It is possible to have words come to your mind, and still refrain from speaking them aloud.Collection: Mind
Once you get a brother, you don’t give him up easy.Collection: Brother