Orson Scott Card Quotes

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“Intellectual understanding does not always bring visceral belief.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If words can be lethal weapons, I must provide them with an arsenal.”

“If you asked me to marry you all over again today I'd say yes, said Valentine.

And if I had only met you for the first time today, I'd ask.”

“I don't freeze up because it isn't my battle. I'm helping. I'm watching. But I'm free. Because it's Ender's game.”

“… the thing with brothers is, you're supposed to take turns being the keeper. Sometimes you get to sit down and be the brother who is kept.”

“My father always said that government is like watching another man piss in your boot. Someone feels better but it certainly isn’t you.”

“Sometimes happiness consists of finding the right balance of misery.”

“He is dangerous, he is beautiful, I could drown in his understanding.”

“I am a creature of chemicals.”

“Love is random; fear is inevitable.”

“The only teacher that's worth anything to you is your enemy.”

“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.”

“You underestimate yourself.”

“You're not crazy. You're not evil. But you can't stop.”

“The doctrine he was going to be teaching, starting tonight, was not the sort of ideology that would stir souls; no one would die for this religion. It would only attracts converts by promising a return to old tradition and by seeming to be the religion of the future.”

“Your father cares as little as we do. It's just that he tends to despair, while we are full of hope.”

“Before the story he refused to even think about it; after the story, it became conceivable to him, and, once he could conceive of it, it soon became inevitable.”

“It has been my experience that the better a man you are, the more folks there are who resent you for it, and find occasion to get angry at you no matter how kindly meant your deeds may be.”

““I knew God had heard my prayer when I learned that it was you and no other who drew this case.”
“One judge is coughing his life out into bloody handkerchiefs and the other is burying his wife, and you think this is how God answers your prayers?””

“It just gripes me hollow, the way God always sneaks in to take the credit.”

“He deserved to die except that nothing deserves death.”

“Only boys were so foolish that they actually believed their arguments were their reasons.”

“When we intended to enjoy being cruel, we must transform our victim into either a beast or a god.”

““You're such a liar.”
“But I’m a beautiful liar, don’t you think?” She flashed her best smile at her friend.
“I don’t understand what men see in women anyway,” her friend answered. “Hexes or no hexes, as long as a woman has her clothes on a man can’t see what he’s interested in anyhow.””

“I've known too many men who never quite felt married no matter how many wives they'd been through. Their own and otherwise.”

“It is the downfall of evil, that it never sees far enough ahead.”

“You take responsibility for us all. Without ever waiting to be told.
So do all good people. That's what it means to be a good person.”

“You spend your whole life grieving for those who haven’t died yet.”

“Which is the greater wrong? To hurt the unforgiving one, or hurt the one who has forgiven all?”

“His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life.”

“We all choose our own teachers, don't we? I wonder if our choice of teacher shows anything about what our lives will be.”

“How could you tell, when utter honesty and cynical manipulation would each account completely for the things she said and did?”

““Am I hired?”
“There is no legal way you can get me out of paying that much of my taxes.”
“On the contrary, Mr. Wiggin. The tax laws are designed to trick people into paying more than they have to. That way the rich who are in the know get to take advantage of drastic tax breaks, while those who don’t have such good connections and haven’t yet found an accountant who does are tricked into paying ludicrously higher amounts.””

“Even the most "Rational" people — the ones who claimed not to have a religion — were just as chauvinistic about their irreligion, sneering at and ostracizing the believers just the way the believers treated nonmembers of their own groups. It's a human universal.”

“Why won't anyone ever answer my questions?"
"Because you never stop asking them and especially because you keep asking them even when it's clear that nobody knows the answers."
"Well, how do I know that they don't know the answer unless I ask?”

“What's so wrong with feeling sorry for myself? Better that than trying to get other people to feel sorry for me.”

“Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up in it, nothing else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes lying around, it must be spring already. But you don't care, because your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight. You won.”

“If a father commands a son to commit a crime so terrible that the son can't do it and live with himself, then is it betrayal for the son to disobey his father?”

“He understood the tone of voice instinctively, as he always had; it was his greatest gift, to know emotions even better than the person feeling them.”

“We are all fools when one wise man appears.”

“The others are even more likely to obey their god.
Which is?
It dangles between their legs.”

“La Tia was fearless, but that could mean either that she had no guile or that she had no conscience.”

“I want to see the king.
Wonderful. I'm glad for you.
Why are you so glad?
Because it's good for every human being to have an unfulfilled wish. It makes all of life so poignant.”

“The ways of love are strange and hard: the love you want is always barred; the love you have you want to change. The ways of love are hard and strange.”

“I'll be dead and you'll think about this day and wonder which of us was more the slave, you or me!”

““We don’t go to Fort Chicago,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “We go to the holy place.”
“A church?” asked Alvin.
Ta-Kumsaw laughed. “You White people, when you make a place holy you build walls so nothing of the land can get in. Your god is nothing and nowhere, so you build a church with nothing alive inside, a church that could be anywhere, it doesn’t matter—nothing and nowhere.”
“Well what does make a place holy?” asked Alvin.
“Because that’s where the Red man talks to the land, and the land answers.””

“You are exactly what you seem, and so you always assume that other people are, too.”