Orson Scott Card
What a waste of time to be posthumously famous.Collection: Waste
For children love is a feeling; for adults, it is a decision. Children wait to learn if their love is true by seeing how long it lasts; adults make their love true by never wavering from their commitment.Collection: Children
You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knos waht warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure youo didn't know. You were reckless and brilliant and young. It's waht you were born for.Collection: Heart
We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreamsCollection: Dream
Perhaps every writer who thoroughly creates a fictional world will inevitably create a mirror of his own time and yet also create a world that no one else but him has ever visited.Collection: Mirrors
In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.' What is it then?' It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.Collection: Suicide
I love you Ender. More than ever. No matter what you decide.Collection: Love You
I don't care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won't get you out of this school.Collection: School
We're like the wicked witch. We promise gingerbread, then eat the little brats alive.Collection: Promise
Valentine had long ago observed that in a society that expected chastity and fidelity, like Lusitania, the adolescents who controlled and channeled their youthful passions were the ones who grew up to be both strong and civilized. Adolescents in such a community who were either too weak to control themselves or too contemptuous of society's norms to try usually ended up being either sheep or wolves- either mindless members of the herd or predators who took what they could and gave nothing.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Children
Dona Crista laughed a bit. "Oh, Pip, I'd be glad for you to try. But do believe me, my dear friend, touching her heart is like bathing in ice." I imagine. I imagine it feels like bathing in ice to the person touching her. But how does it feel to her? Cold as she is, it must surely burn like fire.Collection: Believe
It is in the turmoil of chaos that we discover what, if anything, we are.Collection: What If
As history shows us, when colonization is voluntary, people will self-select better than any testing system. It’s like those foolish attempts to control immigration to American based on the traits that were deemed desirable, when in fact the only trait that defines Americans historically is “descended from somebody willing to give up everything to live there.” Willingness is the single most important test.Collection: Giving Up
Quim," she said, "don't ever try to teach me about good and evil. I've been there, and you've seen nothing but a map.Collection: Evil
I didn't want to see you." "They told me." "I was afraid that I'd still love you." "I hoped that you would.Collection: Love You
The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow.Collection: Today
someone's sent a loving note in lines of returning geese and as the moon fills my western chamber as petals dance over the flowing stream again I think of you the two of us living a sadness apart a hurt that can't be removed yet when my gaze comes down my heart stays upCollection: Hurt
I know everything I need to know already," Rigg always said... To which Father always replied,"See how ignorant you are? You don't even know why you need to know the things you don't know yet." "So tell me," said Rigg. "I would but you're too ignorant to understand the reasons why your ignorance is a fatal disease.Collection: Father
The tribe is whatever we believe it is. If we say the tribe is all the Little Ones in the forest, and all the trees, then that is what the tribe is. Even though some of the oldest trees here came from warriors of two different tribes, fallen in battle. We become one tribe because we say we're one tribe." Ender marveled at his mind, this small raman [member of another sentient species]. How few humans were able to grasp this idea, or let it extend beyond the narrow confines of their tribe, their family, their nation.Collection: Believe
Peace. That's what salaam means. Peace unto you." The words brought forth an echo from Ender's memory. His mother's voice reading to him softly, when he was very young. ... The kiss, the word, the peace were with him still. I am only what I remember, and Alai is my friend in a memory so intense that they can't tear him out. Like Valentine, the strongest memory of all.Collection: Mother
A broken clock is right two times a day.Collection: Two
The nations that offer to arbitrate are the ones that think they should rule the world.Collection: Thinking
If you read to your kids you'll make readers out of them, partly because they'll associate reading with good parent time.Collection: Reading
She will look at you as women look at men, and she will judge you as a woman judge men, not on the strength of their arguments, and not in their cleverness or prowess in battle, but rather on the force of their character, the intensity of their passion, their strength of soul, their compassion, and... ah, this above all... their conversation.Collection: Passion
If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault.Collection: Inspirational
A good working definition of fanaticism is that you are so convinced of your views and policies that you are sure that anyone who opposed them must be either stupid and decieved or have some ulterior motive. We are today a nation where almost everyone in the public eye displays fanaticism with every utterance.Collection: Stupid
The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.Collection: Past
Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind," Jane intoned. "Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head.Collection: Real
If you lay a hand on me I'll ram your testicles so far up inside your abdomen it'll take a heart surgeon to get them out.Collection: Heart
It's the problem with age. You have all these rusty arguments, and no quarrel to use them in. My brain is a museum, but alas, I'm the only visitor, and even I am not terribly interested in the displays.Collection: Love
Do not shout at me, Mr. Quill," said John [Adams]. "Justice may be blind, but she is not deaf.Collection: Justice
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.Collection: Father
A duel is just two murders who agree to take turns trying to kill each other.Collection: Two
An eye for an eye? How Christian of you.' Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians.Collection: Christian
Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Clever
Love is random; fear is inevitable.Collection: Love Is
Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon.Collection: Opinion
Your trust in rationality makes you irrational.Collection: Irrational
Science Fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees.Collection: Tree
If you listen very carefully, you can hear the good fairy come in the night and leave our assignment for tomorrow.Collection: Good Night
He loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.Collection: Echoes
The most evil creatures dont desire the destruction of everythingthey only desire to exploit it for themselves.Collection: Evil
There is a myth that homosexuals are 'born that way,' and we are pounded with this idea so thoroughly that many people think that somebody, somewhere, must have proved it.Collection: Thinking
Ho said, 'I do not grieve because my feet have been cut off. I grieve because a precious jewel is dubbed a mere stone, and a man of integrity is called a deceiver. This is why I weep.'Collection: Integrity
Civilisation is only a pretense. In crisis we have become mere apes again, forgetting the rational biped of our pretensions and instead becoming the hairy primate at the mouth of the cave, screeching at the enemy wishing it would go away, fingering the heavy stone we will use the moment it comes close enoughCollection: Enemy
Truth, when we are fortunate enough to find it, is like bad-tasting medicine. It rarely comes as a pleasant surprise, because if it surprises us, it means we've been denying it for some time and have a lot of beliefs based on falsehood. It's hard to give up those beliefs.Collection: Giving Up
Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey.Collection: Successful