Top 500 Orson Scott Card Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you.”

— Orson Scott Card

302. “One of Ender’s toonmates shook his head. “You dumb as a thumb.”

— Orson Scott Card

303. “Here are our failures, and here is our greatness; we did not mean to hurt you, and we forgive you for our death.”

— Orson Scott Card

304. “You will learn to defeat the enemy.”

— Orson Scott Card

305. “Human beings didn’t evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing’s the first thing we learned.”

— Orson Scott Card

306. “The bones are hard and by themselves seem dead and stony, but by rooting into and pulling against the skeleton, the rest of the body carries out all the motions of life.”

— Orson Scott Card

307. “Aw, Poke, you poor, kind, decent, stupid girl. You saved me and I let you down.”

— Orson Scott Card

308. “You spend your whole life grieving for those who haven’t died yet.”

— Orson Scott Card

309. “A rustic setting always suggests fantasy; to suggest science fiction, you need sheet metal and plastic. You need rivets.”

— Orson Scott Card

310. “The enemy’s gate was down.”

— Orson Scott Card

311. “Sometimes good people have to do terrible things.”

— Orson Scott Card

312. “No system works well unless good people do their jobs with integrity, and then almost any system works well enough.”

— Orson Scott Card

313. “All education is self-education,” said Noxon. “And all self-education builds on the foundation provided by your teachers.”

— Orson Scott Card

314. “The priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he’s responsible for every choice we make.”

— Orson Scott Card

315. “Who would I be, if other good souls did not make up for my shortcomings?”

— Orson Scott Card

316. “If desire did not dim the brain, nobody would ever get married, drunk, or fat.”

— Orson Scott Card

317. “People are never fair, even when they try to be... and few are the ones who try.”

— Orson Scott Card

318. “I’ve had enough adventures,” said Noxon, “to know that boredom is the closest thing to happiness. Boredom means that there’s nothing wrong. You’re not hungry, you’re not in pain. Nobody’s making any demands on you. Your mind is free to think whatever you want. The only thing that makes boredom unpleasant is if you’re impatient for something else to happen.”

— Orson Scott Card

319. “Rumors are the sauce of a dry life.”

— Orson Scott Card

320. “A real god doesn’t care about control. A real god already has control of everything that needs controlling. Real gods would want to teach you how to be just like them.”

— Orson Scott Card

321. “I spend all my time thinking things through. It’s acting on my thoughts that gets tricky. Which ones should I act on, and which ones should I ignore?”

— Orson Scott Card

322. “That is the tragedy of language, my friend. Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong.”

— Orson Scott Card

323. “Running was the way he dreamed. Having never been in control of his life, his idea of freedom was simply to break free. He dreamed of being at the mercy of the wind, carried aloft and blown here and there, a life of true randomness instead of always being part of someone else’s purpose.”

— Orson Scott Card

324. “It’s simple. Nothing exists except in relation to something else.”

— Orson Scott Card

325. “I know because I was also broken as a child and forced to become a wicked conniving selfish manipulating monster in order to protect the fragile love-hungry girl who would have been destroyed by the life I had to lead.”

— Orson Scott Card

326. “They also knew that Ender trusted them to do as they judged best when he gave them no orders.”

— Orson Scott Card

327. “It was not right, thought Han Fei-tzu, for his wife to die before him: her ancestor-of-the-heart had outlived her husband. Besides, wives should live longer than husbands. Women were more complete inside themselves. They were also better at living in their children. They were never as solitary as a man alone.”

— Orson Scott Card

328. “While you’re governing the colony and I’m writing political philosophy, They’ll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other’s room and play checkers and have pillow fights.”

— Orson Scott Card

329. “If you lay a hand on me I’ll ram your testicles so far up inside your abdomen it’ll take a heart surgeon to get them out.”

— Orson Scott Card

330. “When have you ever seen someone who had no doubts who was also correct about anything?”

— Orson Scott Card

331. “What I’m telling you is, there’s some people who do things so bad it tears at the fabric of the world, and then there’s some people so sweet and good that they can feel it when the world gets torn.”

— Orson Scott Card

332. “He thinks I’m like him, Mazer realized. That’s what we do as humans; it’s how we read minds. We assume that other people think like we do. So if we’re nasty and suspicious and conniving we assume that everyone is as nasty and suspicious and conniving as we are.”

— Orson Scott Card

333. “Mine mine mine. That was the curse and power of human beings – that what they saw and loved they had to have. They could share it with other people but only if they conceived of those people as being somehow their own. What we own is ours. What you own should also be ours. In fact, you own nothing, if we want it. Because you are nothing. We are the real people, you are only posing as people in order to try to deprive us of what God means us to have.”

— Orson Scott Card

334. “Maybe knowing about craziness means you don’t have to fall for it.”

— Orson Scott Card

335. “Debased men, but they all had something in common: They showed a keen regard for virtue, and tried to dress themselves in that costume. Hypocrisy, for all its bad reputation, at least showed a decent respect for goodness.”

— Orson Scott Card

336. “Characters, as most writers understand, are truly developed through their relationships with others.”

— Orson Scott Card

337. “I merely observe that all living things are manipulated. As long as there is a will, it is bent and twisted constantly. Only the dead are allowed the luxury of freedom, and then only because they want nothing, and therefore can’t be thwarted.”

— Orson Scott Card

338. “You get all the pleasures of the puppeteer.”

— Orson Scott Card

339. “To have a choice at all is to be free – even when the choice is between two terrible things.”

— Orson Scott Card

340. “And enough for me that when my hand touched your shoulder, you leaned on me; and when you felt me slip away, you called my name.”

— Orson Scott Card

341. “A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.”

— Orson Scott Card

342. “Since when do you have to tell the enemy when he has won.”

— Orson Scott Card

343. “With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.”

— Orson Scott Card

344. “There is no harder job than parenting. There is no human relationship with such potential for great achievement and awful destructiveness, and despite all the experts who write about it, no one has the slightest idea whether any decision will be right or best or even not-horrible for any particular child. It is a job that simply cannot be done right.”

— Orson Scott Card

345. “One judge is coughing his life out into bloody handkerchiefs and the other is burying his wife, and you think this is how God answers your prayers?”

— Orson Scott Card

346. “If you could make them feel as you can make me feel, then perhaps they could forgive you.”

— Orson Scott Card

347. “Ender had come to feel a unity so strong that the word “we” came to his lips much more easily than “I.”

— Orson Scott Card

348. “His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life.”

— Orson Scott Card

349. “Keep this in mind – it only works because what’s between you, that’s real, that’s what matters. Billions of those connections between human beings. That’s what you’re fighting to keep alive.”

— Orson Scott Card

350. “You’re cultural supremacists to the core. You’ll perform your Questionable Activities to help out the poor little piggies, but there isn’t a chance in the world you’ll notice when they have something to teach you.”

— Orson Scott Card