Top 500 Orson Scott Card Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “If you can’t do it twice, you can’t do it at all.”

— Orson Scott Card

352. “This was done to you by men and women whose only desire was to enslave you; they have succeeded so well that you are proud of your slavery.”

— Orson Scott Card

353. “A man without a wife and babies is a menace to civilization... One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.”

— Orson Scott Card

354. “When you have faith in something a lot of other people believe then you a member of the church” said Ceas, “When you have faith in something nobody believes, then you a complete wacko.”

— Orson Scott Card

355. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

360. “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

361. “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

362. “Everything we do means something, Ender realized. Them laughing. Me not laughing. He toyed with the idea of trying to be like the other boys. But he couldn’t think of any jokes, and none of theirs seemed funny. Wherever their laughter came from, Ender couldn’t find such a place in himself.”

— Orson Scott Card

363. “He woke up and fought another battle and won. Then he went to bed and slept again and dreamed again and then he woke up and won again and slept again and he hardly noticed when waking became sleeping. Nor did he care.”

— Orson Scott Card

364. “I’m never impossible. The most I ever allow myself is to be somewhat unlikely.”

— Orson Scott Card

365. “Ulysses, obviously. It was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.”

— Orson Scott Card

366. “Once you get a brother, you don’t give him up easy.”

— Orson Scott Card

367. “My own feeling is that human happiness is a very random thing, and bestows itself willy-nilly, and there’s not much deserving about the matter.”

— Orson Scott Card

368. “Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors – we hope – of your life come from reading fiction.”

— Orson Scott Card

369. “If you wait until you know everything, you never do anything.”

— Orson Scott Card

370. “Maybe that’s all demons ever are. People like us, doing things without even knowing what we’re doing.”

— Orson Scott Card

371. “Don’t win loyalty, just obedience, and only while the lash is in the room.”

— Orson Scott Card

372. “In philosophy class I think we finally decided that ‘good’ is an infinitely recursive term – it can’t be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it’s better than bad, though why it’s better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.”

— Orson Scott Card

373. “People love to hear the brag of the local boy, because they want him to be great, but the foreigner must deny that he has any outstanding virtue – this is what will endear him to the locals.”

— Orson Scott Card

374. “I’ve learned much, Father, and this above all: that no station in life is above any other, if it’s occupied by someone with a good heart.”

— Orson Scott Card

375. “Unfortunately, we live in a time when the media are almost a monoculture.”

— Orson Scott Card

376. “Thank God for you, Ender. Thank God.”

— Orson Scott Card

377. “I don’t know a soul who doesn’t maintain two separate lists of doctrines the ones that they believe that they believe; and the ones that they actually try to live by.”

— Orson Scott Card

378. “Alvin smiled back, and kissed her. “People talk about fools counting chickens before they hatch. That’s nothing. We name them.”

— Orson Scott Card

379. “To a man with only a hammer, a screw is a defective nail.”

— Orson Scott Card

380. “One is never too old to be a student of the enemy.”

— Orson Scott Card

381. “We need you to help us figure out how you can help us.”

— Orson Scott Card

382. “I don’t know why people who got what they need to be happy don’t just go ahead and be happy.”

— Orson Scott Card

383. “All these uses a valid; all these reading of the book are “correct”. For all these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world of Ender’s Game, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.”

— Orson Scott Card

384. “If only we were wiser or better people, perhaps the gods would explain to us the mad, unbearable things they do.”

— Orson Scott Card

385. “Better to have the trust of the people than their respect. With trust, their respect could be earned later; without it, respect could never be deserved, and so to have it would be like poison.”

— Orson Scott Card

386. “Religion makes them crazy. Not a woman I ever met wasn’t crazy with religion.”

— Orson Scott Card

387. “But I fear that I also underestimate the stupidity of the rest of mankind. Are we absolutely sure that we ought to win this war?”

— Orson Scott Card

388. “Power will always end up with the sort of people who crave it.”

— Orson Scott Card

389. “Maybe we’re the fools, for thinking we know things. Maybe humans are the only ones who can deal with the fact that nothing can ever be known at all.”

— Orson Scott Card

390. “Why else do we read fiction, anyway? Not to be impressed by somebody’s dazzling language – or at least I hope that’s not our reason. I think that most of us read these stories that we know are not ‘true’ because we’re hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story.”

— Orson Scott Card

391. “What you are is a man who means to be good, and undo the bad he’s done, and that’s as good as any man ever gets.”

— Orson Scott Card

392. “I don’t believe that there are aliens. I believe there are really different people.”

— Orson Scott Card

393. “These children had never looked death in the face and then chosen to live anyway.”

— Orson Scott Card

394. “I realized that everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It’s the proving ground for new writers and new ideas.”

— Orson Scott Card

395. “Where loyalty bound creatures together, they became something larger, something new and whole and inexplicable.”

— Orson Scott Card

396. “I’ve got a pretty good idea what children are, and we’re not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares.”

— Orson Scott Card

397. “When both parties are lying and they both know the other party’s lying, it comes powerful close to being the same thing as telling the truth.”

— Orson Scott Card

398. “It has been my experience that the better a man you are, the more folks there are who resent you for it, and find occasion to get angry at you no matter how kindly meant your deeds may be.”

— Orson Scott Card

399. “The Lord took twice the time making thee, Alvin Smith, cause it took that long to put the mischief in.”

— Orson Scott Card

400. “I own the whole world, and folks haven’t been keeping up too well on the payments.”

— Orson Scott Card