Top 500 Orson Scott Card Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “That’s why he hates you, because you didn’t suffer when he tried to punish you.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

354. “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

355. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Orson Scott Card

357. “But most of those to whom Ender’s Game feels most important are those who, like me, feel themselves to be perpetually outside their most beloved communities, never able to come inside and feel confident of belonging.”

— Orson Scott Card

358. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

360. “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

361. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

363. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

365. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

367. “They prayed for it, they want it, but when they got it, they complained.”

— Orson Scott Card

368. “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

369. “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

370. “Apparently the Dutch now prided themselves on being better at queues than the English, which was absurd, because standing cheerfully in line was the English national sport.”

— Orson Scott Card

371. “If you can’t do it twice, you can’t do it at all.”

— Orson Scott Card

372. “Who was more cursed, the one who died, unknowing until the very moment of his death, or the one who watched his destruction as it approached, step by step, for days and weeks and years?”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

376. “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

377. “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

378. “Five chickens do not make a cow.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

380. “America’s intellectual community has never been very bright. Or honest. They’re all sheep, following whatever the intellectual fashion of the decade happens to be. Demanding that everyone follow their dicta in lockstep. Everyone has to be open-minded and tolerant of the things they believe, but God forbid they should ever concede, even for a moment, that someone who disagrees with them might have some fingerhold of truth.”

— Orson Scott Card

381. “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

382. “Perhaps every writer who thoroughly creates a fictional world will inevitably create a mirror of his own time and yet also create a world that no one else but him has ever visited...”

— Orson Scott Card

383. “He is dangerous, he is beautiful, I could drown in his understanding.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

385. “He couldn’t go into his army’s barracks – he had long since learned that the best commanders stay away unless they have some reason to visit. The boys have to have a chance to be at peace, at rest, without someone listening, to favor or despise them depending on the way they talk, and act, and think.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

387. “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

388. “You have to think ahead, the next move, the next move, the next move, to see where it’s all going to lead.”

— Orson Scott Card

389. “All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

391. “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

392. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

394. “We live in a time when moderates are treated worse than extremists, being punished as if they were more fanatical than the actual fanatics.”

— Orson Scott Card

395. “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

396. “We don’t admit it to ourselves, not until the very moment of death, but in that moment, we see all life before us and we understand how we chose, every day of our lives, the manner of our death.”

— Orson Scott Card

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card