Top 500 Orson Scott Card Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

406. “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

407. “A non-materialist. And yet you are unpleasantly fat. A gluttonous ascetic? Such a contradiction.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

410. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

412. “History’s got no bows on it, only frayed ends of ribbons and knots that can’t be untied.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

415. “We do what we must to earn our place in the community, but we live for the hours at home. For each other, for the children. It will never get me written up in the history books.”

— Orson Scott Card

416. “It just gripes me hollow, the way God always sneaks in to take the credit.”

— Orson Scott Card

417. “When you really know someone, you can’t hate him.”

— Orson Scott Card

418. “Then he was done. He pulled away, rolled onto his back. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re welcome,” she said. She believed in answering what people meant, not what they said.”

— Orson Scott Card

419. “You are the least-alone person I have ever known. Your heart has always included within it everyone who let you love them, and many who did not.”

— Orson Scott Card

420. “See how ignorant you are? You don’t even know why you need to know the things you don’t know yet.”

— Orson Scott Card

421. “This emotion I’m feeling now, this is love, right?”

— Orson Scott Card

422. “He was cold and tired, but he ignored the cold. Around him stars shone. Some bright, some dim, the most constant things in life. Segundo smiled up at them, happy at least to be dying among friends.”

— Orson Scott Card

423. “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

424. “As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what “just living” might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.”

— Orson Scott Card

425. “It wasn’t so bad being a slave when your owner was yourself and stood up for you.”

— Orson Scott Card

426. “Fatherhood to us was an act of passion, soon forgot; but not to Orem ap Avonap. Never guessing that the blond and happy farmer was no blood of his, Orem had taken a part of that simple man into himself and saved it for this time. At any time in the Palace he might run by, Youth on this shoulders or, as time went by, toddling along behind.”

— Orson Scott Card

427. “As a species, we have evolved to survive. And the way we do it is by straining and straining and, at last, every few generations, giving birth to genius. The one who invents the wheel. And light. And flight. The one who builds a city, a nation, an empire...”

— Orson Scott Card

428. “There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane.”

— Orson Scott Card

429. “You underestimate yourself.”

— Orson Scott Card

430. “Names come and go. They get attached to you, and then you lose them, and they get attached to someone else.”

— Orson Scott Card

431. “He was much more useful as a name and a story than he would ever be as an inconvenient flesh-and-blood person.”

— Orson Scott Card

432. “Evil isn’t best served by equally evil servants.”

— Orson Scott Card

433. “It was astonishingly light, to hold all the hope and future of a great race within it.”

— Orson Scott Card

434. “Working is hard and distracts from having fun.”

— Orson Scott Card

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435. “Maybe it isn’t based on what you deserve. Maybe it’s based on what you need.”

— Orson Scott Card

436. “I didn’t know how you’d get us out of that last one. But you did. You were good.”

— Orson Scott Card

437. “Nights were so real that days began to seem dreamlike to him.”

— Orson Scott Card

438. “As for Peter – we didn’t even suggest a meeting, and so he didn’t have a chance to tell us to go to hell.”

— Orson Scott Card

439. “That night Demosthenes published a scathing denunciation of the population limitation laws. People should be allowed to have as many children as they like, and the surplus population should be sent to other worlds, to spread mankind so far across the galaxy that no disaster, no invasion could ever threaten the human race with annihilation. “The most noble title any child can have,” Demosthenes wrote, “is Third.”

— Orson Scott Card

440. “But I’m three times your age or more and my brain is worn out and full up. I don’t have much room to tuck new things square inside; they just cling to the outside for a while and drop off.”

— Orson Scott Card

441. “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

442. “Ender began to eat, slowly and carefully, pretending not to notice he was the center of attention.”

— Orson Scott Card

443. “Unless he’s really clever,” said Theresa. “Smarter than us?” said Peter. He and John Paul looked at each other. Then both of them shook their heads, said, “Naw,” and then burst out laughing.”

— Orson Scott Card

444. “We’re going to make him the best military commander in history. And then put the fate of the world on his shoulders.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

446. “If you had any brains, you’d be in a real career, like selling life insurance.”

— Orson Scott Card

447. “They aren’t having a mental conversation between people with different thought processes. All their thoughts are present, together, at once.”

— Orson Scott Card

448. “Inside us there is a place that is our true self.”

— Orson Scott Card

449. “I will love you forever, he thought. I am lying, he thought, and this time he was right.”

— Orson Scott Card

450. “Ender’s anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo’s was hot, and so it used him.”

— Orson Scott Card