Top 500 Orson Scott Card Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.”

— Orson Scott Card

52. “Sickness and healing are in every heart; death and deliverance in every hand.”

— Orson Scott Card

53. “Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”

— Orson Scott Card

54. “Good people do not let others suffer needlessly.”

— Orson Scott Card

55. “Good people aren’t good because they never cause harm to others. They’re good because they treat others the best way they know how, with the understanding that they have.”

— Orson Scott Card

56. “He loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.”

— Orson Scott Card

57. “The best thing about my job, though, is stopping at the end of the day and rejoining the human universe.”

— Orson Scott Card

58. “Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon.”

— Orson Scott Card

59. “Others find humanity by looking in their own hearts. Only lost souls need to search for it outside themselves.”

— Orson Scott Card

60. “We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness – the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.”

— Orson Scott Card

61. “Your ego-depletion seems problematically difficult to assuage.”

— Orson Scott Card

62. “One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.”

— Orson Scott Card

63. “Human beings are free except when humanity needs them.”

— Orson Scott Card

64. “All the common people want is to be left alone. All the ordinary soldier wants is to collect his pay and not get killed. That’s why the great forces of history can be manipulated by astonishingly small groups of determined people.”

— Orson Scott Card

65. “America is an empire that does not wish to be one ; we are easily discouraged from doing what must be done to maintain the global order that allows democracy and prosperity to flourish.”

— Orson Scott Card

66. “Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart.”

— Orson Scott Card

67. “And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?”

— Orson Scott Card

68. “Science Fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees.”

— Orson Scott Card

69. “Once you duct-tape a Ziploc bag to a man’s chest, there’s no going back.”

— Orson Scott Card

70. “Two trees – knowledge and life. You eat of the tree of knowledge, and you will surely die. You eat of the tree of life, and you remain a child in the garden forever, undying.”

— Orson Scott Card

71. “It was the waiting and watching that cost the most. For during that time he had to endure.”

— Orson Scott Card

72. “The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.”

— Orson Scott Card

73. “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.”

— Orson Scott Card

74. “Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.”

— Orson Scott Card

75. “Human beings may be miserable specimens, in the main, but we can learn, and, through learning, become decent people.”

— Orson Scott Card

76. “So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.”

— Orson Scott Card

77. “Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me – to find out what you’re good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools.”

— Orson Scott Card

78. “A weak King must be what other Kings have been; a strong King is himself, and from then on the meaning of the name of King is changed.”

— Orson Scott Card

79. “Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves.”

— Orson Scott Card

80. “Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.”

— Orson Scott Card

81. “Nobody ever completely means what they say. Even when they think they’re telling the truth, there’s always something hidden behind their words.”

— Orson Scott Card

82. “We’re like the wicked witch. We promise gingerbread, then eat the little brats alive.”

— Orson Scott Card

83. “You’re a monster. Thanks. Does this mean I get a raise? No, just a medal. The budget isn’t inexhaustable.”

— Orson Scott Card

84. “Sometimes you have to trust people enough to let them succeed and love them enough to let them fail.”

— Orson Scott Card

85. “Soldiers can sometimes make decisions that are smarter than the orders they’ve been given.”

— Orson Scott Card

86. “Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.”

— Orson Scott Card

87. “We have to go. I’m almost happy here.”

— Orson Scott Card

88. “Well, I’m your man. I’m the bloody bastard you wanted when you had me spawned. I’m your tool, and what difference does it make if I hate the part of me that you most need? What difference does it make that when the little serpents killed me in the game, I agreed with them, and was glad.”

— Orson Scott Card

89. “I have to win this now, and for all time, or I’ll fight it every day and it will get worse and worse.”

— Orson Scott Card

90. “Ender Wiggin must believe that no matter what happens, no adult will ever, ever step in to help him in any way.”

— Orson Scott Card

91. “It is in the turmoil of chaos that we discover what, if anything, we are.”

— Orson Scott Card

92. “The only people who ever prize purity of ignorance are those who profit from a monopoly on knowledge.”

— Orson Scott Card

93. “The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.”

— Orson Scott Card

94. “Where ideas are real and reality is shadow.”

— Orson Scott Card

95. “Two sides of the same coin, but which side is which?”

— Orson Scott Card

96. “Your trust in rationality makes you irrational.”

— Orson Scott Card

97. “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.”

— Orson Scott Card

98. “Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.”

— Orson Scott Card

99. “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

100. “Come in, Bean. Come in Julian Delphiki, longed-for child of good and loving parents. Come in, kidnapped child, hostage of fate. Come and talk to the Fates, who are playing such clever little games with your life.”

— Orson Scott Card