Orson Scott Card Quotes

There are miracles even reactivity can't pull off, Ender

~ Orson Scott Card

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

~ Orson Scott Card

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

~ Orson Scott Card

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.

~ Orson Scott Card

Mine mine mine. That was the curse and power of human beings—that what they saw and loved they had to have. They could share it with other people but only if they conceived of those people as being somehow their own. What we own is ours. What you own should also be ours. In fact, you own nothing, if we want it. Because you are nothing. We are the real people, you are only posing as people in order to try to deprive us of what God means us to have.

~ Orson Scott Card

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

~ Orson Scott Card

It was not about physical strength, Wit reminded himself. It was 90 percent mental, 10 percent physical. That's what the SEAL instructors were looking for: men and women who could disregard the pleadings of the body. Pain was nothing, sleep was nothing. What was chaffed skin, wrecked muscles, bleeding sores? The body chooses to be sore. The body chooses to be exhausted. But the SEAL mind rejects it. The SEAL mind commands the body, not the other way around.

~ Orson Scott Card

Do not be disingenuous with me, Colonel Graff. Americans are quite apt at playing stupid when they choose to, but I am not to be deceived.

~ Orson Scott Card

To a man with only a hammer, a screw is a defective nail.

~ Orson Scott Card

My mind, my logical, practical, reasoning mind, is peeing in his mind pants.

~ Orson Scott Card

If you can cheat, so can I. I won't let you beat me unfairly - I'll beat you unfairly first.

~ Orson Scott Card

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.

~ Orson Scott Card

That's what Father and Mother are, thought Nafai. They stay together, not because of any gain, but because of the gift. Father doesn't stay with Mother because she is good for him, but rather because together they can do good for us, and for many others.

~ Orson Scott Card

I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! You didn't want me, you bastards, you wanted Peter, but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!

~ Orson Scott Card

Ender began to eat, slowly and carefully, pretending not to notice he was the center of attention.

~ Orson Scott Card

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.

~ Orson Scott Card

Never take another human being to the third life, because we don't know how to go.

~ Orson Scott Card

We are wise to be cautious, but I suggest we prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

~ Orson Scott Card

He was not prepared to deal with my mistake, thought Jane, and he did not understand the suffering his response would cause me. He is innocent of wrong -doing, and so am I. We shall forgive each other and go on. It was a good decision, and Jane was proud of it. The trouble was, she couldn't carry it out. Those few seconds in which parts of her mind came to a halt were not trivial in their effect on her. There was trauma, loss, change; she was not now the same being that she had been before. parts of her had died. Parts of her had become confused, out of order...She discovered, as many a living being had discovered, that rational decisions are far more easily made than carried out.

~ Orson Scott Card

I hope I am remembered by my children as a good father.

~ Orson Scott Card

Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.

~ Orson Scott Card

The education that prepared me was my general education classes, which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate, but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.

~ Orson Scott Card

There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good', to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.

~ Orson Scott Card