Top 500 Orson Scott Card Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “Don’t we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don’t we try to frame it so they’ll choose as we think they should?”

— Orson Scott Card

353. “Remember, I’m the only person her who’s paid to be nice to you. But not too nice. Give me any lip and I’ll break your face. OK?”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

356. “That’s why he hates you, because you didn’t suffer when he tried to punish you.”

— Orson Scott Card

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

360. “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

361. “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

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

— 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. “My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you’ll get a different answer.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

366. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

368. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

376. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

383. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

391. “I always think of books as being like people. Even the dull ones are worthy of decent respect, but you don’t have to seek them out and spend time with them.”

— 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. “Before we are citizens, he thought, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty. I have done my duty. I have bowed to authority. Mostly. And now, like Russia, I can set aside those burdens for a little while and see what happens.”

— Orson Scott Card

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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