Top 500 Orson Scott Card Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

406. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

408. “You underestimate yourself.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

411. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

414. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

418. “I was born with more power inside myself than I ever dreamed. But along with it there came no more sense than any other idiotic kid. Somewhere along in here I need to grow up into a man I can stand to live with. A man who doesn’t just survive, but deserves to.”

— Orson Scott Card

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

423. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

425. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

427. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “Maybe she couldn’t know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

439. “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

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

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

442. “As the proverb said, “Think in the morning, Act in the noon, Eat in the evening, Sleep in the night.” Too late for thinking now. Too early for eating.”

— Orson Scott Card

443. “Until you know that you’re tougher than the enemy, you maneuver, you don’t commit to battle.”

— Orson Scott Card

444. “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

445. “The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow.”

— Orson Scott Card

446. “Besides,” said Rigg-the-killer, “I don’t want to leave the future of the human race on both planets in the tiny little hands of the sentient mice of Odinfold.”

— Orson Scott Card

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

— Orson Scott Card

448. “But he was never one of them; their relationship was too unequal. He had loved them so he could know them, and he had known them so he could use them.”

— Orson Scott Card

449. “The snake began to unweave itself from the rug again, only this time Ender did not hesitate. He stepped on the head of the snake and crushed it under his foot. It writhed and twisted under him, and in response he twisted and ground it deeper into the stone floor. Finally it was still. Ender picked it up and shook it, until it unwove itself and the pattern in the rug was gone. Then, still dragging the snake behind him, he began to look for a way out.”

— Orson Scott Card

450. “I am a creature of chemicals.”

— Orson Scott Card