Orson Scott Card Quotes

But if you caught my informant,' said Achilles, 'why in the world would Chamrajnagar—or Graff, if it was him—launch the shuttle anyway? Was catching me doing something naughty so important they’d risk a shuttle and it’s crew just to catch me? I find that quite… flattering. Sort of like winning the Nobel Prize for scariest villain.

~ Orson Scott Card

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.

~ Orson Scott Card

I don't think it has anything to do with truth, Olhado. It's just cause and effect. We never can sort them out. Science refuses to admit any cause except first cause-knock down one domino, the one next to it also falls. 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.

~ Orson Scott Card

Madness, and then illumination.

~ Orson Scott Card

No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.

~ Orson Scott Card

We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreams.

~ Orson Scott Card

The kid is scary.

~ Orson Scott Card

You will soon learn that there ARE no strange stars, no alien skies- No?Only skies and stars, in all their varieties. Each one with its own flavour, and all flavours good- Now YOU think like a tree. Flavours! Of skies!I have tasted the heat of many stars, and all of them were sweet

~ Orson Scott Card

Another oral exam, huh?' Peter said.'Shut up, Peter,' said Valentine.'You should relax and enjoy it,' said Peter. 'It could be worse.''I don't know how.''It could be an anal exam.

~ Orson Scott Card

There are rules to everything, even if nobody made them up, even if nobody calls it a game. And if you want things to work out well, it's best to know the rules and only break them if you're playing a different game and following those rules.

~ Orson Scott Card

Colonel Graff: We won! That's all that matters.Ender Wiggin: No. The way we win matters.

~ Orson Scott Card

What we've done is make the categories of science fiction and fantasy larger, freer, and more inclusive than any other genre of contemporary literature. We have room for everybody, and we are extraordinarily open to genuine experimentation.

~ Orson Scott Card

...You believe that the kind of story you want to tell might be best received by the science fiction and fantasy audience. I hope you're right, because in many ways this is the best audience in the world to write for. They're open-minded and intelligent. They want to think as well as feel, understand as well as dream. Above all, they want to be led into places that no one has ever visited before. It's a privilege to tell stories to these readers, and an honour when they applaud the tale you tell.

~ Orson Scott Card

Then, as Father had trained him, Rigg thought past his feelings.

~ Orson Scott Card

Since we are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable, tool-making creatures who arose from other evolutionary paths and see not beasts but brothers, not rivals by fellow pilgrims journeying to the shrine of intelligence. Yet that is what I see, or yearn to see. The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged but in the creature judging, and 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

I will never hurt you.I will always help you.If you are hungryIll give you my food.If you are frightenedI am your friend.I love you now.And love does not end.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

~ Orson Scott Card

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.

~ Orson Scott Card

The emotion she could deal with best was anger.

~ Orson Scott Card

I didn't want to hurt him! Ender cried. Why didn't he just leave me alone!

~ Orson Scott Card

Carn Carby left, and ender mentally added him to his private list of people who also qualified as human beings.

~ Orson Scott Card

For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.

~ Orson Scott Card

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.

~ Orson Scott Card

You made them hate me. Said EnderSo? What will you do about it? Crawl in a corner? Start kissing their little backsides so they'll love you again? There's only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore you. I told them you were the best. Now you damn well better be. -Graff

~ Orson Scott Card

That's why he hates you, because you didn't suffer when he tried to punish you.

~ Orson Scott Card

Being here alone with nothing to do, I've been thinking about myself too. Trying to understand why I hate myself so badly.

~ Orson Scott Card

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...

~ Orson Scott Card

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.

~ Orson Scott Card

I am old enough now to have all the memories of my people locked within my head. I remember things that happened long before I was born. I remember things that never happened at all. I live in memory. –Anton

~ Orson Scott Card

Poke had never shared out so many raisins, because she had never had so many to share. But the little kids wouldn't understand that. They'd think, Poke gave us garbage, and Achilles gave us raisins. That's because they were stupid.

~ Orson Scott Card

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.

~ Orson Scott Card

Sometimes lies are more dependable than the truth.

~ Orson Scott Card

Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.

~ Orson Scott Card

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.

~ Orson Scott Card

Human beings *do* metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered.

~ Orson Scott Card

Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be. She thought of that, worried about it for a few days, and then wrote a column using that as a premise, to show that politicians who toadied to the Russians in order to keep the peace would inevitably end up subservient to them in everything.

~ Orson Scott Card

Every day people judge all other people. The question is whether they judge wisely.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

~ Orson Scott Card

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.

~ Orson Scott Card

The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life... But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong—for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.

~ Orson Scott Card