Top 500 Orson Scott Card Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Peter, why do I get the idea that you are thinking of this as a golden opportunity for Peter Wiggin?” “For both of us, Val.” “Peter, you’re twelve years old. I’m ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.” “But we don’t think like other children, do we, Val? We don’t talk like other children. And above all, we don’t write like other children.” “For a discussion that began with death threats, Peter, we’ve strayed from the topic, I think.”

— Orson Scott Card

202. “Everybody thinks Hitler got to power because of his armies, because they were willing to kill, and that’s partly true, because in the real world power is always built on the threat of death and dishonor. But mostly he got to power on words, on the right words at the right time.”

— Orson Scott Card

203. “If there’s a problem, you fix it. You don’t set up fences around it and make rules about how it should be fixed. You fix it.”

— Orson Scott Card

204. “I sold my brother,” Valentine said, “and they paid me for it.”

— Orson Scott Card

205. “It is the downfall of evil, that it never sees far enough ahead.”

— Orson Scott Card

206. “Ender, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know how it feels. I’m sorry, I’m your brother. I love you.”

— Orson Scott Card

207. “There’s only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that’s being so good at what you do that they can’t ignore you.”

— Orson Scott Card

208. “In war, everyone has their chance to bleed.”

— Orson Scott Card

209. “We need a Napoleon. An Alexander. Except that Napoleon lost in the end, and Alexander flamed out and died young. We need a Julius Caesar, except that he made himself a dictator, and died for it.”

— Orson Scott Card

210. “If you can cheat, so can I. I won’t let you beat me unfairly – I’ll beat you unfairly first.”

— Orson Scott Card

211. “Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, then happiness as we can manage it.”

— Orson Scott Card

212. “I hope I am remembered by my children as a good father.”

— Orson Scott Card

213. “Order and disorder’, said the speaker, ’they each have their beauty.”

— Orson Scott Card

214. “Science fiction is about what could be but isn’t; fantasy is about what couldn’t be.”

— Orson Scott Card

215. “And anyway most people are idiots. They don’t care about the why. They only care about what threatens them.”

— Orson Scott Card

216. “From now on, as far as you’re concerned, Dink Meeker is God.’ ‘Then who are you?’ ‘The personnel officer who hired God.”

— Orson Scott Card

217. “Ender Wiggin must believe that no matter what happens, no adult will ever, ever step in to help him in any way. He must believe, to the core of his soul, that he can only do what he and the other children work out for themselves. If he does not believe that, then he will never reach the peak of his abilities.”

— Orson Scott Card

218. “I’m neutral on lying, seeing as how there’s times when the truth just hurts people.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

220. “Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be. She thought of that, worried about it for a few days, and then wrote a column using that as a premise, to show that politicians who toadied to the Russians in order to keep the peace would inevitably end up subservient to them in everything.”

— Orson Scott Card

221. “The world was full of locked doors, and he had to get his hand on every key.”

— Orson Scott Card

222. “No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one’s life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.”

— Orson Scott Card

223. “Ender understood more than she said. Manipulation of gravity was one thing; deception by the officers was another; but the most important message was this: the adults are the enemy, not the other armies. They do not tell us the truth.”

— Orson Scott Card

224. “I have hope for you, if only because you’re the only one left to hope for.”

— Orson Scott Card

225. “Isolation is – the optimum environment for creativity.”

— Orson Scott Card

226. “We don’t use the word ‘intelligence’ with software. We regard that as a naive idea. We say that it’s ‘complex.’ Which means that we don’t always understand what it’s doing.”

— Orson Scott Card

227. “As long as you keep getting born, it’s alright to die some times.”

— Orson Scott Card

228. “If he was a good man, how could he leave me? So he must not be a good man. But if he isn’t good, then why does it hurt so much to lose him?”

— Orson Scott Card

229. “There’s never enough information... That’s the great tragedy of human knowledge. No matter how much we think we know, we can never predict the future.”

— Orson Scott Card

230. “Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down.”

— Orson Scott Card

231. “Is it some law of human nature that you inevitably become whatever your first commander was? I can quit right now, if that’s so.”

— Orson Scott Card

232. “The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.”

— Orson Scott Card

233. “Into the the air, into the earth, into the fire, I am with you.”

— Orson Scott Card

234. “No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.”

— Orson Scott Card

235. “I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there.”

— Orson Scott Card

236. “Thus I began to realize that, as it is, Ender’s Game disturbs some people because it challenges their assumptions about reality. In fact, the novel’s very clarity may make it more challenging, simply because the story’s vision of the world is so relentlessly plain. It was important to her, and to others, to believe that children don’t actually think or speak the way the children in Ender’s Game think and speak.”

— Orson Scott Card

237. “The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who’ve forgotten their own childhood.”

— Orson Scott Card

238. “I stole their future from them; I can only being to repay by seeing what I can learn from their past.”

— Orson Scott Card

239. “Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender.”

— Orson Scott Card

240. “It’s all just fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward but they’re never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach.”

— Orson Scott Card

241. “Make friends. Be a leader. Kiss butts if you have to, but if the other guys despise you-you know what I mean?”

— Orson Scott Card

242. “My needs are simple and few, thought Valentine. Food. Clothing. A comfortable place to sleep. And no idiots!”

— Orson Scott Card

243. “Oh, Pipo, I’d be glad for you to try. But do believe me, my dear friend, touching her heart is like bathing in ice” I imagine. I imagine it feels like bathing in ice to the person touching her. But how does it feel to her? Cold as she is, it must surely burn like fire.”

— Orson Scott Card

244. “Be proud, Bonito, pretty boy. You can go home and tell your father, Yes, I beat up Ender Wiggin, who was barely ten years old, and I was thirteen. And I had only six of my friends to help me, and somehow we managed to defeat him, even though he was naked and wet and alone – Ender Wiggin is so dangerous and terrifying it was all we could do not to bring two hundred.”

— Orson Scott Card

245. “If you listen very carefully, you can hear the good fairy come in the night and leave our assignment for tomorrow.”

— Orson Scott Card

246. “Good people can’t out-think evil, cause evil thinks of things good folks can’t think of.”

— Orson Scott Card

247. “You don’t understand,” he said. “Yes I do.” “No you don’t. I don’t want to beat Peter.” “Then what do you want?” “I want him to love me.” She had no answer. As far as she knew, Peter didn’t love anybody. Ender said nothing more. Just lay there.”

— Orson Scott Card

248. “Panem et Circenses translates into ‘Bread and Circuses.’ The writer was saying that in return for full bellies and entertainment, his people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power.”

— Orson Scott Card

249. “That is the Earth, he thought. Not a globe thousands of kilometers around, but a forest with a shining lake, a house hidden at the crest of the hill, high in the trees, a grassy slope leading upward from the water, fish leaping and birds strafing to take the bugs that lived at the border between water and sky. Earth was the constant noise of crickets and winds and birds. And the voice of one girl, who spoke to him out of his far-off childhood.”

— Orson Scott Card

250. “An interesting side effect of the battle was that Ender emerged at the top of the soldier efficiency list. Since he hadn’t fired a shot, he had a perfect record on shooting – no misses at all. And since he had never been eliminated or disabled, his percentage there was excellent. No one else came close. It made a lot of boys laugh, and others were angry, but on the prized efficiency list, Ender was now the leader.”

— Orson Scott Card