Top 500 Orson Scott Card Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “All is going well, very well, I couldn’t ask for anything better – So why do I hate my life?”

— Orson Scott Card

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

120. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

127. “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

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. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

131. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

133. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

136. “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

137. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

141. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

143. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

145. “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

146. “A man who can’t read only knows what other folks tell him.”

— Orson Scott Card

147. “But Father has also taught him: Treat a man as if he had a fine reputation to protect, and he will usually endeavor to deserve it.”

— Orson Scott Card

148. “It’s the middle class that feels the luxury of being able to have causes.”

— Orson Scott Card

149. “War was never so careful as to inflict suffering only where it was merited.”

— Orson Scott Card

150. “There’s a sort of rage a man feels when he’s been deceived where he most trusted. It compares to no other anger.”

— Orson Scott Card