“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.”
Source: The Worthing Chronicle
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Orson Scott Card 586
American science fiction novelist 1951Related quotes

“Your right arm is useful in the battle; but when it comes to thinking you need my guidance. You have force without intelligence; while mine is the care for to-morrow. You are a good fighter; but is I who help Atrides select the time of fighting. Your value is in your body only; mine, in mind. And, as much as he who directs the ship surpasses him who only rows it, as much as the general exceeds the common soldier, so much greater am I than you. For in these bodies of ours the heart is of more value than the hand; all our real living is in that.”
Tibi dextera bello
utilis: ingenium est, quod eget moderamine nostro;
tu vires sine mente geris, mihi cura futuri;
tu pugnare potes, pugnandi tempora mecum
eligit Atrides; tu tantum corpore prodes,
nos animo; quantoque ratem qui temperat, anteit
remigis officium, quanto dux milite maior,
tantum ego te supero; nec non in corpore nostro
pectora sunt potiora manu: vigor omnis in illis.
Book XIII, 361–369; translation by Frank Justus Miller https://archive.org/details/metamorphoseswit02oviduoft
Metamorphoses (Transformations)

Fiction, The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End (1974)

“There is no greater social evil than religion. It is the cancer in the body of humanity.”
Source: Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002), Chapter 9, “Evil” (p. 34)