Top 500 Orson Scott Card Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “All he had to do was watch the game and understand how things worked, and then he could use the system, and even excel.”

— Orson Scott Card

103. “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

104. “Human beings do metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered.”

— Orson Scott Card

105. “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.”

— Orson Scott Card

106. “God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal – there’s no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.”

— Orson Scott Card

107. “Being young is an 18 year prison sentence for a crime your parents committed. But you do get time off for good behavior.”

— Orson Scott Card

108. “When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn’t yet know that he needs your wisdom you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man.”

— Orson Scott Card

109. “It’s what I was born for, isn’t it? If I don’t go, why am I alive?”

— Orson Scott Card

110. “We spend our lives guessing at what’s going on inside everybody else, and when we happen to get lucky and guess right, we think we ‘understand.’ Such nonsense. Even a monkey at a computer will type a word every now and then.”

— Orson Scott Card

111. “Knowing something may be a terrible burden to bear, but it holds no danger to them as aren’t afraid of truth.”

— Orson Scott Card

112. “It’s easy to manipulate your children when they’re absolutely sure you’re stupid.”

— Orson Scott Card

113. “One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.”

— Orson Scott Card

114. “I’m right here. This is who I really am. I’m not pretending.”

— Orson Scott Card

115. “You who speak languages, you are such liars.”

— Orson Scott Card

116. “There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy show you where you are weak. Only the enemy shows you where he is strong. And the rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you. – Mazer Rackham.”

— Orson Scott Card

117. “If the other fellow can’t tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn’t trying to kill you.”

— Orson Scott Card

118. “What else should you be? Human beings didn’t evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing’s the first thing we learned. And a good thing we did, or we’d be dead, and the tigers would own the earth.”

— Orson Scott Card

119. “Reasonable argument is impossible when authority becomes the arbiter.”

— Orson Scott Card

120. “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.”

— Orson Scott Card

121. “For children love is a feeling; for adults, it is a decision. Children wait to learn if their love is true by seeing how long it lasts; adults make their love true by never wavering from their commitment.”

— Orson Scott Card

122. “Where do you draw the line between a humble man who knows his own weaknesses but tries to act out virtues he hasn’t quite mastered yet, and a proud man who pretends to have those virtues without the slightest intention of acquiring them?”

— Orson Scott Card

123. “I’ll have that someday, thought Peter. Someone who’ll kiss me good-bye at the door. Or maybe just someone to put a blindfold over my head before they shoot me. Depending on how things turn out.”

— Orson Scott Card

124. “Isn’t that what it means to be civilized? That you can wait to get what you want?”

— Orson Scott Card

125. “Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.”

— Orson Scott Card

126. “None of us could be happy for long, doing nothing.”

— Orson Scott Card

127. “Ho said, ‘I do not grieve because my feet have been cut off. I grieve because a precious jewel is dubbed a mere stone, and a man of integrity is called a deceiver. This is why I weep.’”

— Orson Scott Card

128. “There are times when you have to defend yourself or someone else against relentless evil. And some of those times the only defense that has any hope of succeeding is a one-time use of brutal, devastating force. At such times good people act brutally.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

130. “He’d undone all he could. You can be sorry, and you can be forgiven, but you can’t call back the futures that your bad decisions lost.”

— Orson Scott Card

131. “A broken clock is right two times a day.”

— Orson Scott Card

132. “Satanic Verses is a despicable book that could not have been written by a person who wished to behave decently and responsibly.”

— Orson Scott Card

133. “When I write fiction, I create characters whose views are not my own, and I allow them to be eloquent in defense of their, not my, views.”

— Orson Scott Card

134. “When your child goes off to war, you will never get him back. Not as he was, not the same boy. Changed, if he comes back at all.”

— Orson Scott Card

135. “Please don’t disillusion me. I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

— Orson Scott Card

136. “Home is anywhere that you know all your friends and all your enemies.”

— Orson Scott Card

137. “The only way to learn is by changing your mind.”

— Orson Scott Card

138. “The bigger a man is, the more people he serves,” said the Prophet. “A small man serves himself. Bigger is to serve your family. Bigger is to serve your tribe. Then your people. Biggest of all, to serve all men, and all lands.”

— Orson Scott Card

139. “So I want to ask you a hypothetical question. My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind.”

— Orson Scott Card

140. “I don’t care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won’t get you out of this school.”

— Orson Scott Card

141. “Before we are citizens, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty.”

— Orson Scott Card

142. “Folks always seemed to think that as long as they didn’t know about something bad, it wasn’t happening, so whoever told them actually caused it to be true.”

— Orson Scott Card

143. “Think like a machine instead of a boy.”

— Orson Scott Card

144. “Some men are great enough that they can love a whole woman, and not just part of her.”

— Orson Scott Card

145. “The fear of death in the one place was not as strong as another kind of fear, the fear of a world gone crazy, a place where anything could happen, where nothing could be trusted, where nothing was certain. A terrible place.”

— Orson Scott Card

146. “Once you have the gallows, you’ll find new reasons to hang people from it.”

— Orson Scott Card

147. “Your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.”

— Orson Scott Card

148. “To expect wickedness from human beings is the best way I know of to avoid surprises. And when I am surprised, it’s always pleasantly.”

— Orson Scott Card

149. “I always tell what I believe. Whether it’s true, I’m no more sure than any man.”

— Orson Scott Card

150. “For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events.”

— Orson Scott Card