Orson Scott Card

“Oh, Val," said Father. "All you have to do is live your life, and everyone around you will be happier.""No greatness, then.""Val," said Mother, "goodness trumps greatness any day.""Not in the history books," said Valentine."Then the wrong people are writing history, aren't they?" said Father.”

“In philosophy class I think we finally decided that 'good' is an infinitely recursive term - it can't be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it's better than bad, though why it's better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.”

“An eye for an eye? How Christian of you.'Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians.”

“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.”

“Home is anywhere that you know all your friends and all your enemies.”

“My needs are simple and few, thought Valentine. Food. Clothing. A comfortable place to sleep. And no idiots.But of course a world with no idiots would be lonely. If she herself were even allowed there.”

“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.”

“Then they, too, lay down on mattresses stuffed with straw, hearing the music of the flies to buzz them to sleep, holding each other's hands as they dozed, thinking of the miracles by which love works its will in the world.”

“With life. Rooter says that life is how God gives purpose to the universe.”

“Order and disorder', said the speaker, 'they each have their beauty.”

“Ulysses was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.”

“Where did this whole thing begin? If what we think of as reality is just a pattern that somebody brought Outside, and the universe just popped into bring, then whoever it was is probably still wandering around giving off universes wherever she goes So where did she come from? And what was there before she started doing it? And how did Outside come to exist, for that matter?”That's Inspace thinking,” said Olhado. “That's the way you conceive of things when you still believe in space and time as absolutes. You think of everything starting and stopping, of things having origins, because that's the way it is in the observable universe. The thing is, Outside there's no rules like that at all. Outside was always there and always will be there. The number of philotes there is infinite, and all of them always existed. No mater how many of them you pull out and put into organized universes, there'll be just as many left as there always were”But somebody had to start making universes.”Why?” asked Olhado.Because-because I-“Nobody ever started. It's always been going on. I mean, if it weren’t already going on, it couldn’t start. Outside where there weren’t any patterns, it would be impossible to conceive of a pattern. They can’t act, by definition, because they literally can’t even find themselves.”But how could it have always been going on?”Think of it as this moment in time, the reality we live in at this moment, this condition of the entire universe-of all the universes-” You mean now.”Right. Think of it as if now were the surface of a sphere. Time is moving forward through the chaos of Outside like the surface of an expanding sphere, a balloon inflating. On the outside, chaos. On the inside, reality. Always growing-like you said, Valentine. Popping up new universes all the time.”But where did this balloon come from?”OK, you’ve got the balloon. The expanding sphere. Only now think of it as a sphere with an infinite radius.”Valentine tried to think of what that would mean. “The surface would be completely flat.”That’s right”And you could never go all the way around it”That’s right, too. Infinitely large. Impossible even to count all the universes that exist on the reality side. And now, starting from the edge, you get on a starship and start heading inward toward the center. The farther in you go, the older everything is. All the old universes back and back. When do you get to the first one?”You don’t” said Valentine. “Not it you’re traveling at a finate rate.”You don’t reach the center of a sphere on infinite radius, if you’re starting at the surface, because no matter how far you go, no matter how quickly, the center, the beginning, is always infinitely far away.”And that’s where the universe began.”

“He kissed her and killed her then dumped her body in the river.”

“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.”

“Oops, I thought. Oops is an all-purpose word standing for every bit of profanity, blasphemy, and pornographic and scatological execration I could think of.”

“The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.”

“Love is random; fear is inevitable.”

“Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon.”

“Your trust in rationality makes you irrational.”

“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.”

“Science Fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees.”

“He could see Bonzo's anger growing hot. Hot anger was bad. Ender's anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo's was hot, and so it used him. ”

“When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.”

“In order to learn, one must change one's mind.”

“If you listen very carefully, you can hear the good fairy come in the night and leave our assignment for tomorrow.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.”

“Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.”

“The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Armies have spent a lot of time and effort training their soldiers not to think of the enemy as human beings. It’s so much easier to kill them if you think of them as dangerous animals. The trouble is, war isn’t about killing. It’s about getting the enemy to stop resisting your will. Like training a dog not to bite. Punishing him leaves you with a beaten dog. Killing him is a permanent solution, but you’ve got no dog. If you can understand why he’s biting and remove the conditions that make him bite, sometimes that can solve the problem as well. The dog isn’t dead. He isn’t even your enemy.”

“Human beings may be miserable specimens, in the main, but we can learn, and, through learning, become decent people.”

“History is an omlette. THe eggs are already broken.”

“So you chose not to be part of the bands of children who group together for the sole purpose of excluding others, and people look at you and say, poor girl, she’s so isolated, but you know a secret, you know who you really are. You are the one human being who is capable of understanding the alien mind, because you are the alien mind; you know what it is to be unhuman because there’s never been any human group that gave you credentials as a bona fide homo sapien# [He] wondered if it was already too late to teach her how to be a human”

“Since when do you have to tell the enemy when he has won”

“An enemy, Ender Wiggin," whispered the old man. "I am your enemy, the first one you've ever had who was smarter than you. There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong. And the rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you. I am your enemy from now on. From now on I am your teacher.”

“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.”

“A character is what he does, yes - but even more, a character is what he means to do.”

“Human: That's stupid. Isn't there grass on both sides?”

“The only way to retrieve a secret,once known, is to replace it with a lie.”

“Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.”

“As long as you keep getting born, it's all right to die sometimes”

“One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.”

“there were crimes and quarrels, alongside kindness and cooperation; there were people who loved each other and people who did not; it was a human world.”

“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.”