Top 100 Orson Scott Card Quotes
#1. Folks always seemed to think that as long as they didn't know about something bad, it wasn't happening, so whoever told them actually caused it to be true.
Orson Scott Card
#2. To expect wickedness from human beings is the best way I know of to avoid surprises. And when I am surprised, it's always pleasantly.
Orson Scott Card
#3. It [seed of doubt] made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise. (Ender's Game, page 111)
Orson Scott Card
#4. I own the whole world, and folks haven't been keeping up too well on the payments.
Orson Scott Card
#5. If he was to get any real help from them, they would have to break out of those old patterns and reach new conclusions.
Orson Scott Card
#6. Better to have the trust of the people than their respect. With trust, their respect could be earned later; without it, respect could never be deserved, and so to have it would be like poison.
Orson Scott Card
#7. Every time, I've won because I could understand the way my enemy though. From what they did. I could tell what they though I was doing, how they wanted the battle to take shape. And I played off of that. I'm very good at that. Understanding how other people think. - Ender Wiggin
Orson Scott Card
#8. We may be young, but we're not powerless. We play by their rules long enough, and it becomes our game.
Orson Scott Card
#9. Who but the adolescent is free to have the adventures that most of us are looking for when we turn to storytellers to satisfy our hunger?
Orson Scott Card
#10. Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.
Orson Scott Card
#11. It is possible to have words come to your mind, and still refrain from speaking them aloud.
Orson Scott Card
#12. Computers were a kind of magery in themselves, or might as well be - to people who didn't understand them, they were every bit as inscrutable.
Orson Scott Card
#14. Better to dangle from strings than to be bound tight by them,
Orson Scott Card
#15. Thou art fertile ground, and I will plant a garden in thee.
Orson Scott Card
#16. For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events.
Orson Scott Card
#17. I doubt that America will come to Europe again. You'll be on your own against militant Islam.
Orson Scott Card
#18. If you read to your kids, you'll make readers out of them, partly because they'll associate reading with good parent-time.
Orson Scott Card
#19. As they say, a word to the wise is sufficient. And here I've gone and written five paragraphs.
Orson Scott Card
#20. Could you possibly be a little more incoherent?" asked Olivenko. "There are bits of this I'm almost understanding, and I'm sure that's not what you have in mind.
Orson Scott Card
#21. Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors
we hope
of your life come from reading fiction.
Orson Scott Card
#22. Just one more example of why a commander who ruled by fear and made all the decisions himself would always be beaten, sooner or later.
Orson Scott Card
#23. [T]he politically correct are above the rules of ordinary civility, once they have identified you as an unbeliever in their religion.
Orson Scott Card
#24. 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.
Orson Scott Card
#25. He dreamed, as human beings always dream - random firings of memory and imagination that the unconscious mind tries to put together into coherent stories. Bean rarely paid attention to his own dreams, rarely even remembered that he dreamed at all. But
Orson Scott Card
#26. If you wait until you know everything, you never do anything.
Orson Scott Card
#27. Ivan couldn't think of a religion that was any damn good at making utter truthtellers out of its practitioners. Maybe the Quakers were truly plainspoken at one time, but even they managed to squeeze out a Richard Nixon after a few hundred years of suppressing their human propinquity for untruth.
Orson Scott Card
#28. 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.
Orson Scott Card
#29. The house always smells like good food," said Piotr. "It's the perfume of love.
Orson Scott Card
#30. And what? What's the other choice? To passively let things happen and then say: "Tut-tut, what at botch that was"? Don't we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don't we try to frame it so they'll chose as we think they should?
Orson Scott Card
#31. Will people really go?" "People always go. Always. They always believe they can make a better life than in the old world.
Orson Scott Card
#32. The difference between science fiction and fantasy ... is simply this: science fiction has rivets and fantasy has trees.
Orson Scott Card
#34. You're cultural supremacists to the core. You'll perform your Questionable Activities to help out the poor little piggies, but there isn't a chance in the world you'll notice when they have something to teach you.
Orson Scott Card
#35. 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
#36. No one with him to tell him he must eat, he must go practice, he must sleep. Freedom. The trouble was, he didn't know what to do.
Orson Scott Card
#38. It is in the turmoil of chaos that we discover what, if anything, we are.
Orson Scott Card
#39. 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
#41. Let me be loved like that, by a man who will not replace me with concubines when I'm old and ugly. Let me be loved by a man who loves God more than me.
Orson Scott Card
#42. Didn't Jesus say something disparaging about casting pearls before swine?
Orson Scott Card
#43. We have discussed your definition, analyzed its ramifications to a reasonable depth, and accept it," said the expendable.
"Meaning I gave you what you wanted?"
"Ambition and desire are human traits. You gave us what we lacked.
Orson Scott Card
#44. The only way to end things completely was to hurt him enough that his fear was stronger than his hate.
Orson Scott Card
#45. Intellectual understanding does not always bring visceral belief.
Orson Scott Card
#46. [H]e had come to work for what the fee could buy, and not for joy of the work itself.
Orson Scott Card
#47. When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn't yet know that he needs your wisdom you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man.
Orson Scott Card
#48. They prayed for it, they want it, but when they got it, they complained.
Orson Scott Card
#49. 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.
Orson Scott Card
#51. But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore.
Orson Scott Card
#52. 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
#53. And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?
Orson Scott Card
#54. If they had the ordinary amount of good luck. Which didn't seem to be the trend at the moment.
Orson Scott Card
#56. America. The enemy. The rival. The land of jeans and rock and roll, of crime and capitalism, of poverty and oppression. Of home and freedom.
Orson Scott Card
#57. We're an ecological disaster."
"Exactly," said the expendable.
Orson Scott Card
#58. Running was the way he dreamed. Having never been in control of his life, his idea of freedom was simply to break free. He dreamed of being at the mercy of the wind, carried aloft and blown here and there, a life of true randomness instead of always being part of someone else's purpose.
Orson Scott Card
#59. That's why he hates you, because you didn't suffer when he tried to punish you.
Orson Scott Card
#60. I didn't want to hurt him!" Ender cried. "Why didn't he just leave me alone!
Orson Scott Card
#61. Being young is an 18 year prison sentence for a crime your parents committed. But you do get time off for good behavior.
Orson Scott Card
#62. How many times are you two going to have to save me from myself before this whole drama runs its course?" asked Peter. "I think ... six times," said Father. "No, eight," said Mother. "You two think you're so cute," said Peter. "Mm-hm." "Yep.
Orson Scott Card
#63. Better to give the man what he wanted and save the objections for the battles worth fighting.
Orson Scott Card
#64. There's no part of the ceremony where the priest, acting in the place of God, warns the guests not to murder the bridegroom because it might jeopardize the succession.
Orson Scott Card
#65. I'm going to rule, Val, I'm going to have control of something. But I want it to be something worth ruling.
Orson Scott Card
#66. We've devoted our lives to learning about them!" Miro said.
Ender stopped. "Not from them.
Orson Scott Card
#67. The child is mine and Petra's. It's especially important to us because it's the first we know of that definitely does not have my condition."
"You mean it isn't ugly?
Orson Scott Card
#68. Russians are never more cooperative than when they are about to betray you.
Orson Scott Card
#69. Anton: "You're asking me?"
Sister Carlotta: "God not being convenient, I ask a fellow mortal.
Orson Scott Card
#70. Americans love to pick up, move on, start over. But instead of being somebody fresh and new, they become somebody lonely and lost, or, far too often these days, they become nobody at all, a machine for satisfying hunger, without loyalty or honor or duty.
Orson Scott Card
#71. The problem was, the people who should shut up were the ones talking the most.
Orson Scott Card
#72. There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane.
Orson Scott Card
#73. It is a weak man who blames his failures on the strength of others.
Orson Scott Card
#74. She believed that people revealed themselves most when they were vaguely anxious, and few things brought out nonspecific anxieties like being in the presence of a person who never speaks.
Orson Scott Card
#75. He felt like part of himself had been taken away, an inward prop that was holding up his courage and confidence.
Orson Scott Card
#76. I always tell what I believe. Whether it's true, I'm no more sure than any man.
Orson Scott Card
#77. Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.
Orson Scott Card
#78. 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
#79. [Ruthie] ... if he was a good man, how could he leave me? So he must not be a good man. But if he isn't good, then why does it hurt so much to lose him?
Orson Scott Card
#80. Unless he's really clever," said Theresa. "Smarter than us?" said Peter. He and John Paul looked at each other. Then both of them shook their heads, said, "Naw," and then burst out laughing.
Orson Scott Card
#82. And you don't understand how devastating fear and rage can be, and how quickly religion and civilization and human decency are forgotten when a mob forms.
Orson Scott Card
#83. And it occurred to me that what we professors think of as a 'brilliant student' is nothing but a student who is enthusiastically converted to whatever idiotic ideas we've been teaching them.
Orson Scott Card
#84. Time to repay old humiliations, is that it, Bean? 'Of course,' Ender said contemptuously. 'I'm not as close to the floor as you are.
Orson Scott Card
#85. Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart.
Orson Scott Card
#86. Your motivation has to be rock solid. You have to want it so bad that even th threat of death won't take it from you.
Orson Scott Card
#88. Being here alone with nothing to do, I've been thinking about myself too. Trying to understang why I hate myself so badly.
Orson Scott Card
#89. Don't lie to me! Don't seem so normal when I know you have cut yourself off from me in your heart! If you can put on our affectionate closeness like a mask, then I'll never be able to take joy in it again.
Orson Scott Card
#90. When the messenger won't tell you what the hell the message is, my trigger finger gets twitchy. Dismissed.
Orson Scott Card
#91. Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves. And
Orson Scott Card
#92. I suppose this means you can swim after all. Or am I supposed to tow you?"
"If you really try," said Loaf, grinning, "you might not die.
Orson Scott Card
#94. Now she understood that someone had to end the council by declaring specifically what had been decided and what must happen next. Without absolute clarity, people would go off and dither, especially if they had doubts about the decision.
Orson Scott Card
#95. He would always speak the language of the heart with an awkward foreign accent.
Orson Scott Card
#96. 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.
Orson Scott Card
#98. Petra shook her head. I knew you were stupid, because you became a talk-therapy shrink, which is like becoming a minister of a religion in which you get to be God.
Orson Scott Card
#99. But he was never one of them; their relationship was too unequal. He had loved them so he could know them, and he had known them so he could use them.
Orson Scott Card
#100. In the end it was only Peter who had something he could say from the heart.
"Am I the only one here who sees something of himself in the man who's lying inside this box?"
No one had an answer for him, either yes or no.
Orson Scott Card
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