“We live in a time when moderates are treated worse than extremists, being punished as if they were more fanatical than the actual fanatics.”

“You’re not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for the greater you are.”

“Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.”

“It was not right, thought Han Fei-tzu, for his wife to die before him: her ancestor-of-the-heart had outlived her husband. Besides, wives should live longer than husbands. Women were more complete inside themselves. They were also better at living in their children. They were never as solitary as a man alone.”

“You get used to being naked, that's the first thing that Ivan discovered. Crashing through thick brush with branches snagging at your bare skin, you stop worrying about who's looking and and spend your time trying to keep yourself from being flayed alive. He got shy again when they entered the village, but once he decided simply to let the gawkers gawk, he found himself much more interested in what he was seeing than what they were.”

“Oh, I'll live Ender's life, too. It's so much more interesting than my own."~Val”

“Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn’t hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.”