Orson Scott Card Quotes

The most evil creatures don’t desire the destruction of everything—they only desire to exploit it for themselves.

War was never so careful as to inflict suffering only where it was merited.

“My religion,” said Ms. Brown, “is to try to falsify all hypotheses.”

That reminded John Paul of what Andrew had said when he was teaching him to play chess. “You have to think ahead, the next move, the next move, the next move, to see where it’s all going to lead.” John Paul understood the principle as soon as Andrew explained it. But he stopped playing chess anyway, because he didn't care what happened to little plastic figures on a board of sixty-four squares.

Very bad thing, killing little boy. But maybe Red man knows about whisky-Red, very thirsty, making crazy. Not like killing man to take his house or his woman or his land, like White man all the time.

May the day when you need courage never come.
Even as she said it, though, she knew the day would come.

And I says back to him, “Calvin, sounding like an educated man don’t make you educated,” and he says back to me, “I'd rather be ignorant and sound educated than be educated and sound ignorant,” and I said, “Why?” and he says to me, “Because if you sound educated then nobody ever tests you to find out, but if you sound ignorant they never stop.”

“Are you all right, sir?” asked Hezekiah.
“Just fighting over old battles in my mind,” said John. “It’s the problem with age. You have all these rusty arguments, and no quarrel to use them in. My brain is a museum, but alas, I’m the only visitor, and even I am not terribly interested in the displays.”

They gave me powers of thought and memory far beyond anything natural evolution would have given me, but that doesn't give them the right to decide the meaning of my life as if I were some dream. I decide the meaning. If my life is a dream then it's my dream, I'm the dreamer.

Was it worth it? To lose part of who he had been in order to live free? Perhaps this new self was better than the old.

She going to be free now. She can go home to Jesus.
Call me selfish, but I wanted her to go home with me.

You are exactly what you seem, and so you always assume that other people are, too.