Top 500 Orson Scott Card Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You can’t change what you don’t understand.”

— Orson Scott Card

2. “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

3. “This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”

— Orson Scott Card

4. “If you try and lose then it isn’t your fault. But if you don’t try and we lose, then it’s all your fault.”

— Orson Scott Card

5. “I taught you everything you know. But I didn’t teach you everything I know.”

— Orson Scott Card

6. “Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.”

— Orson Scott Card

7. “That is the ultimate power, to stare death in the face and be unafraid.”

— Orson Scott Card

8. “Everyone dies. Everyone leaves. What matters is the things you build together before they go. What matters is the part of them that continues in you when they’re gone.”

— Orson Scott Card

9. “The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.”

— Orson Scott Card

10. “Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.”

— Orson Scott Card

11. “I will never hurt you. I will always help you. If you are hungry Ill give you my food. If you are frightened I am your friend. I love you now. And love does not end.”

— Orson Scott Card

12. “I need you to be clever, Bean. I need you to think of solutions to problems we haven’t seen yet. I want you to try things that no one has ever tried because they’re absolutely stupid.”

— Orson Scott Card

13. “Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone you love is a hostage, sapping your courage and corrupting your judgment.”

— Orson Scott Card

14. “In order to learn, one must change one’s mind.”

— Orson Scott Card

15. “Just because you believe it doesn’t make it so.”

— Orson Scott Card

16. “Don’t lie to me! Don’t seem so normal when I know you have cut yourself off from me in your heart! If you can put on our affectionate closeness like a mask, then I’ll never be able to take joy in it again.”

— Orson Scott Card

17. “I’ve lived too long with pain. I won’t know who I am without it.”

— Orson Scott Card

18. “Let’s fly away and live forever.”

— Orson Scott Card

19. “Don’t judge me until you understand me. You can’t understand me if you’ve already judged me.”

— Orson Scott Card

20. “The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. 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

21. “Remember, the enemy’s gate is down.”

— Orson Scott Card

22. “Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.”

— Orson Scott Card

23. “It is a weak man who blames his failures on the strength of others.”

— Orson Scott Card

24. “Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.”

— Orson Scott Card

25. “Life is a suicide mission.”

— Orson Scott Card

26. “I don’t care if I pass your test, I don’t care if I follow your rules. If you can cheat, so can I. I won’t let you beat me unfairly – I’ll beat you unfairly first. – Ender.”

— Orson Scott Card

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

27. “Unemployment is capitalism’s way of getting you to plant a garden.”

— Orson Scott Card

28. “If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.”

— Orson Scott Card

29. “Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you.”

— Orson Scott Card

30. “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

31. “Love is finding that the things you like best about yourself are not in you at all, but in the person who completes you.”

— Orson Scott Card

32. “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

33. “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

34. “This is what historians usually do, quibble about cause and effect when the point is, there are times when the world is in flux and the right voice in the right place can move the world. Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, for instance. Bismark. Lenin.”

— Orson Scott Card

35. “Faith doesn’t mean you never doubt. It only means you never act upon your doubts.”

— Orson Scott Card

36. “Intellectual understanding does not always bring visceral belief.”

— Orson Scott Card

37. “Science isn’t done by consensus. It’s done by rigorous testing.”

— Orson Scott Card

38. “Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along – the same person that I am today.”

— Orson Scott Card

39. “That’s how it goes within a family. You think you know each other so well, and so you don’t bother hardly getting to know each other at all.”

— Orson Scott Card

40. “Evil people naturally assume that you will use that power exactly as they would use it.”

— Orson Scott Card

41. “There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.”

— Orson Scott Card

42. “Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.”

— Orson Scott Card

43. “Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.”

— Orson Scott Card

44. “A library is the first step of a thousand journeys, portal to a thousand worlds.”

— Orson Scott Card

45. “From now on the enemy is more clever than you. From now on the enemy is stronger than you. From now on you are always about to lose.”

— Orson Scott Card

46. “No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one’s life is nothing.”

— Orson Scott Card

47. “If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement.”

— Orson Scott Card

48. “Isn’t it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality.”

— Orson Scott Card

49. “I have never resisted the lord in my life, and I never will. But I’m not so hungry for dialogue with him that I have to make up his part as well as my own.”

— Orson Scott Card

50. “Ender Wiggin isn’t a killer. He just wins – thoroughly.”

— Orson Scott Card