Orson Scott Card Quotes

They won't be required to sacrifice anything in order to belong to your assembly. A religion that is all sweetness, but no light; all form, but no substance; all tradition, but no precept.

Just because you know I had no other choice doesn't make the anger go away. I understand that. But you're a man now. You can put away these childish things.

The doctrine he was going to be teaching, starting tonight, was not the sort of ideology that would stir souls; no one would die for this religion. It would only attracts converts by promising a return to old tradition and by seeming to be the religion of the future.

Wanting to is the whole lesson; all the rest is practice.

It occurred to me that if my friends were loathsome, perhaps I needed to learn from my enemies.

Which is the greater wrong? To hurt the unforgiving one, or hurt the one who has forgiven all?

That's one of those questions, whether human beings are really capable of change, or if all seeming changes are really a matter of framing the existing character in a different moral situation.

Don't you hate it when somebody knows you better than you know yourself?

Law can change how people behave when others are watching — that's all.

You always do that. Make all the questions harder.
I make them truer.

If a father commands a son to commit a crime so terrible that the son can't do it and live with himself, then is it betrayal for the son to disobey his father?

Only boys were so foolish that they actually believed their arguments were their reasons.

Boys always argued as if they knew then had the forces of logic on their side, even when they were being completely irrational.

I have no secret thoughts... Or rather, they're not secret because I've withheld them — if they're unknown, it's because no one asked.

Maybe if I could bear my life as it is for one day, for one hour, for one minute, I could forget my wish to be something else.