Orson Scott Card

“I could become a businessman and run some big corporation, I'd scramble and maneuver until I was at the top of everything and what would I have? Nothing.”

“I didn't know that empty rationalization was part of your programming," said Ram. "We would not be fit companions for human beings without it.”

“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.”

“We know everything we knew that was worth knowing, that's a crucial distinction.”

“Happiness can depend as easily on useless things as on useful ones.”

“In America, film is the highest form of art that the public aspires to. People will come to me and say ‘Oh, your book was so good, they ought to make a movie out of it!’ To which I reply ‘Well, why? It’s already a book.”

“He thought of half a dozen ideas before he went to sleep. Ender would be pleased-every one of them was stupid.”

“They must talk to each other directly, Ender, mind to mind. What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also re-member. Why would they ever develop language? Why would they ever learn to read and write? How would they know what reading and writing were if they saw them? Or signals? Or numbers? Or anything that we use to communicate? This isn’t just a matter of translating from one language to another. They don’t have a language at all. We used every means we could think of to communicate with them, but they don’t even have the machinery to know we’re signaling. And maybe they’ve been trying to think to us, and they can’t understand why we don’t respond.”

“Do the gods of different nations talk to each other?...Is there some annual get-together where they compare each other's worshippers? Mine will bow their faces to the floor and trace woodgrain lines for me, says one. Mine will sacrifice animals, says another. Mine will kill anyone who insults me, says a third. Here is the question I think of most often: "Are there any who can honestly boast, My worshippers obey my good laws, and treat each other kindly, and live simple generous lives?”

“Religion is tied to the deepest feelings people have. The love that arises from that stewing pot is the sweetest and strongest, but the hate is the hottest, and the anger is the most violent.”

“What kind of rescue is this, where you toss the prisoner a knife and stand and wait to see what happens?”

“I think it's a rule that it's socially acceptable to wet yourself when aliens enter your mind for the first time. If it wasn't already, it is now.”

“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.”

“Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart.”

“...it's so easy, when you never meet people, when you never know the Earth itself... it's easy to forget why Earth is worth saving. Why the world of people might be worth the price you pay.”

“Never mock a tender heart.”

“He knew he could always be smart later, if that turned out to be a better strategy. But once you admitted to being smart, there was no going back.”

“Like climbing a cliff, thinking is a perilous activity for those unused to it.”

“Come on,” he said to Valentine one day. “Let’s fly away and live forever.”“We can’t,” she said. “There are miracles even relativity can’t pull off, Ender.”“We have to go. I’m almost happy here.”“So, stay.”“I’ve lived too long with pain. I won’t know who I am without it.”So they boarded a starship and went from world to world. Wherever they stopped, he was always Andrew Wiggin, itinerant speaker for the dead, and she was always Valentine, historian errant, writing down the stories of the living while Ender spoke the stories of the dead. And always Ender carried with him a dry white cocoon, looking for the world where the hive-queen could awaken and thrive in peace. He looked a long time.”

“He committed the crime of stupidity while under my command," said Citizen."Oh my," said Rigg. "They're handing out the death penalty for that these days?”

“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.”

“I hear they whip you for stealing.""Or put you in jail, or sell you into slavery, or kill you, depending on the town and what mood they're in.”

“I know you know, and you know that I know that you know. It spirals on from there, so let's just assume the dot dot dot.”

“If you try to look up my skirt, I'll poke needles in your eyes right through your eyelids while you're asleep.''I'm looking for help, you give me nightmares, thank you so much.'She was on the top step now, reaching up for a bin marked DRY BEANS. Rigg looked up her skirt, mostly because she told him not to, and saw nothing at all of interest. He could never understand why Nox and other women, too, were always so sure men wanted to see whatever it is they concealed under their clothes.”

“Saving the human race is a frantic one. Or a tedious one. It all depends on what stage of the process you're taking part in.”

“Everything was a test. Or a lesson. Or a punishment from which he was supposed to learn a lesson, on which he would be tested later, and punished if he hadn't learned it.”

“It's laugh or cry," said Rigg."Cry then. Give the old man his due.”

“Poke gave him life. Ender gave it meaning.”

“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.”

“I don't know what's going on in the world," he said. "Everything seemed so reasonable and scientific until I discovered my son was a fraud with the ability to hide my own memories from me. And now you come along. The captain at the gate told me you were executed and buried yesterday.""He spoke to you? He didn't say a word to me," I said."Don't change the subject, young man. I'm accusing you of violating the laws of nature.""Nature's virtue is intact. I just know some different laws.”

“My master wishes to see you," said the mounted man."When the planting's done," I said."Lord Barton is unaccustomed to waiting.""Then he should rejoice, for he'll learn something new today." I went back to the garden. Soon the servant left.”

“I am a disbeliever in the unbelievable.”

“Two sides of the same coin, but which side is which?”

“Perhaps it's called the end of the world because it's the end of the games, because I can go to one of the villages and become one of the little boys working and playing there, with nothing to kill and nothing to kill me, just living there. 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.”

“What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never knew why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even knew themselves. Nobody understands anybody. And yet somehow we live together, mostly in peace, and get things done with a high enough success rate that people keep trying. Human beings get married and a lot of marriages work, and they have children and most of them grow up to be decent people, and they have schools and businesses and factories and farms that have results at some level of acceptability—all without having a clue what’s going on inside anybody’s head. Muddling through, that’s what human beings do.that was the part of being human that Bean hated the most.”

“In the dark, where do shadows go?”

“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.”

“I would have the taste of poison in my mouth all the days of my life, if I went back home and pretended to be what I was before.”

“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.”

“For the first time in his life, a teacher was pointing out things that Ender had not already seen for himself. For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.”

“If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make... So-- as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of hour behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down, one by one, then you can always say, look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of dominoes that can be traced back in an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to... Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society.”

“Hive Queen: They never know anything. They don't have enough years in their little lives to come to an understanding of anything at all. And yet they think they understand. From earliest childhood, they delude themselves into thinking they comprehend the world, while all that's really going on is that they've got some primitive assumptions and prejudices. As they get older they learn a more elevated vocabulary in which to express their mindless pseudo- knowledge and bully other people into accepting their prejudices as if they were truth, but it all amounts to the same thing. Individually, human beings are all dolts.Pequenino: While collectively...Hive Queen: Collectively, they're a collection of dolts. But in all their scurrying around and pretending to be wise, throwing out idiotic half-understood theories about this and that, one or two of them will come up with some idea that is just a little bit closer to the truth than what was already known. And in a sort of fumbling trial and error, about half the time the truth actually rises to the top and becomes accepted by people who still don't understand it, who simply adopt it as a new prejudice to be trusted blindly until the next dolt accidentally comes up with an improvement.>Pequenino: So you're saying that no one is ever individually intelligent, and groups are even stupider than individuals-- and yet by keeping so many fools engaged in pretending to be intelligent, they still come up with some of the same results that an intelligent species would come up with.Hive Queen: Exactly.”

“How could Quing-jao know what the gods meant by anything?”

“Quing-Jao: I am a slave to the gods, and I rejoice in it.Jane: A slave who rejoices is a slave indeed.”

“The only teacher that's worth anything to you is your enemy.”

“Humans invent an imaginary lover and put that mask over the face of the body in their bed. That is the tragedy of language my friend. Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong.”

“Ah, I am the judge of dreams, and you are the judge of love. Well, I find you guilty of dreaming good dreams, and sentence you to a lifetime of working and suffering for the sake of your dreams. I only hope that someday you won't declare me innocent of the crime of loving you.”

“That is the earth, he thought. Not a globe thousands of kilometers around, but a forest with a shining lake, a house hidden at the crest of a hill, high in the trees, a grassy slope leading upwards from the water, fish leaping and birds strafing to take the bugs that lived at the border between water and sky. Earth was the constant noise of crickets, and winds, and birds”

“He was always just mad enough to take treaties seriously. Honor, you know. I don't have any.”

“And the voice of God was in the whirlwind after all, said Thor”