Orson Scott Card

“There was no doubt now in Ender's mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no on ewould 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.”

“As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human being writing human literature to a human audience.”

“I looked for perfection, and I found something better.”

“Maybe that's all demons ever are. People like us, doing things without even knowing what we're doing.”

“You don't know who a person is until you see how he acts when given unexpected power. He hasn't rehearsed for the part. So what you see is what he is.”

“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.”

“With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.”

“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.”

“Paciencia: Hay gente que hace cosas por miedo al látigo. Hay gente que hace cosas por temor a perder sus familias o sus vidas. Hay gente a la cual es posible comprar y vender. ¿Acaso no son esclavos?- Voluntad: Son esclavos de sus pasiones. Su miedo les gobierna. ¿Qué poder tienes sobre mi si tu látigo no me da miedo? ¿Soy tu esclavo si no temo perder a mi familia? Te obedezco de forma completa y fiel porque así lo he escogido: ¿soy tu esclavo? Y cuando llegas a odiarme porque soy libre y mi libertad es mayor que la tuya, y me ordenas hacer lo que no pienso hacer, entonces me alzo ante ti y no obedezco. Castígame entonces; he escogido ser castigado. Y si el castigo es superior a lo que estoy dispuesto a consentir, entonces usaré cuanta fuerza sea necesaria para hacer que pares de castigarme, y no más. Pero nunca, ni por un instante, he hecho nada que no haya escogido hacer voluntariamente.”

“Life is a suicide mission.”

“This is all so silly,' said Diko. 'Who cares about what's real and what isn't real? [...] And as for our own history, the parts that will be lost, who cares if a mathematician calls us dirty names like "unreal"? They say such slanders about the square root of minus two as well.”

“Maybe I will do what I want with my life! The only problem is that I have no idea what I want to do with it.”

“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.”

“(Rigg) had often complained that all these languages were useless, and Father had only said, "A man who speaks but one language understands none.”

“He’d undone all he could. You can be sorry, and you can be forgiven, but you can’t call back the futures that your bad decisions lost”

“He couldn't go into his army's barracks -- he had long since learned that the best commanders stay away unless they have some reason to visit. The boys have to have a chance to be at peace, at rest, without someone listening, to favor or despise them depending on the way they talk, and act, and think.”

“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.”

“The story, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds... transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears... If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.”

“It's easy to manipulate your children when they're absolutely sure you're stupid.”

“A strange thing happened then. The Speaker agreed with her that she had made a mistake that night, and she knew when he said the words that it was true, that his judgment was correct. And yet she felt strangely healed, as if simply saying her mistake were enough to purge some of the pain of it. For the first time, then, she caught a glimpse of what the power of speaking might be. It wasn’t a matter of confession, penance, and absolution, like the priests offered. It was something else entirely. Telling the story of who she was, and then realizing that she was no longer the same person. That she had made a mistake, and the mistake had changed her, and now she would not make the mistake again because she had become someone else, someone less afraid, someone more compassionate.”

“...you seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making mistakes and prove how smart you are to the other students. This is such a pointless, stupid way of listening to teachers that it is clear you are going to waste months of our time before you finally catch on that the only transaction that matters is a transfer of useful information from adults who possess it to children who do not, and that catching mistakes is a criminal misuse of time.”

“It's not enough just to laugh at good fortune and say, 'Enough already.' You have to really mean it -- that you have enough. And because you mean it, you take the surplus and you give it away. Similarly, when bad fortune comes, you bear it until it becomes unbearable -- your family is hungry, or you can no longer function in your work. And then again you say, 'Enough already,' and you change something. You move; you change careers; you let your spouse make all the decisions. Something. You don't endure the unendurable.”

“The prospect of sharing the rest of their lives held no dread for them. . . every word and movement between them carried their history and their future like background movement, shaping each moment even when they weren't aware of it.”

“Ender didn't like fighting. He didn't like Peter's kind, the strong against the weak, and he didn't like his own kind either, the smart against the stupid.”

“Government is all show when it isn't murder in the dark ... or soldiers in the open.”

“I don't care how loyal you think you're going to be Dink. It's not in you. You're a brat and you always will be. So admit what a lousy follower you are and go ahead and LEAD. -Petra”

“So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.”

“I will remember this, thought Ender, when I am defeated. To keep dignity, and give honor where it's due, so that defeat is not disgrace. And I hope I don't have to do it often.”

“The kid is scary.”

“So the I.F. is spying on Earth.""Just as a mother spies on her children at play in the yard.""Good to know you're looking out for us, Mummy.”

“What I want," he said softly, "is to stand in this meadow and walk in the light of the sun.”

“He pulled out a single half-blackened disc of bronze. "Money," he said. "You get it by working, and then you trade it for things you want.""But it's so small," said Runnel."So's your wit," said the man, and turned away.”

“Free will doesn’t exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of our 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 directions, you can never find where the casual chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to.”

“I would carry some of it if I could, Bean said silently. Like I did today, you can turn it over to me and I’ll do it, if I can. You don’t have to do this alone.Only even as he thought this, Bean knew it wasn’t true. If it could be done, Ender was the one who would have to do it. All those months when Bean refused to see Ender, hid from him, it was because he couldn’t bear to face the fact that Ender was what Bean only wished to be — the kind of person on whom you could put all your hopes, who could carry all your fears, and he would not let you down, would not betray you.I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there.”

“Alvin smiled back, and kissed her. "People talk about fools counting chickens before they hatch. That's nothing. We name them.”

“There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.”

“So the whole war is because we can't talk to each other.”

“I taught you everything you know. But I didn't teach you everything I know.”

“Soldiers can sometimes make decisions that are smarter than the orders they've been given.”

“The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.”

“Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.”

“He would always speak the language of the heart with an awkward foreign accent.”

“And always Ender carried with him a dry white cocoon, looking for a place where the hive-queen could awaken and thrive in peace. He looked a long time.”

“If the other fellow can't tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn't trying to kill you.”

“The most noble title any child can have, Demosthenes wrote, is third.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There are many steps on the continuum between controlling something and doing nothing at all.”

“You have to think ahead, the next move, the next move, the next move, to see where it's all going to lead.”

“And Americans always think international laws are for other people anyway,”