Orson Scott Card Quotes
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You're the sort of enemy your enemy must love.
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To face death, that's nothing much. But to feel really stupid when you die, well, that would be insufferable.
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Only boys were so foolish that they actually believed their arguments were their reasons.
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It is the essence of dignity to pretend to desire what you cannot prevent.
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Permanence was always an illusion, and love was just the disguise that lovers wore to hide the death of their union from each other for a while.
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It occurred to me that if my friends were loathsome, perhaps I needed to learn from my enemies.
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You never needed anybody.If you had ever bothered to come to know me, you'd know that that is the exact opposite of the truth.Well, well. So we part in utter ignorance of each other.
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We can wash people in the water all we want, but we can never wash their parents out of their hearts.
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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.
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Asking a man if he could be trusted was like asking an unwed girl if she was a virgin. The question mattered, but the asking of it was a gross insult.
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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.'
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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.
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Such a darling child, they would say, and pat her head. And Miriam would answer in her heart: you made my father a slave. You want us all dead. You are the river, you and all of Egypt. You are the river and as long as we stay beside you we are in danger of drowning.
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'Everybody thinks they want to see the truth,' said Tenkswa-Tawa. 'That’s one of the lies we tell ourselves.'
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He was growing up. Soon he would be a man. He wondered what that would mean. Surely he could not have more required of him as an adult that had been required of him as a child. There could not be more.
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I want to see the king.Wonderful. I'm glad for you.Why are you so glad?Because it's good for every human being to have an unfulfilled wish. It makes all of life so poignant.
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'Did they program brattiness into you?''That’s a trait I developed for myself,' she said. 'Do you like it?'
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He could afford to be generous, since he didn’t have to pay for it himself. Most virtues were like that. People could take pride in how virtuous they were, but the fact was that as soon as virtue got expensive or inconvenient, it was amazing how fast it gave way to practical concerns.
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I do matter, and despising me was the gravest error of their lives.
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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?
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Keep your freedom, keep your immortality, but somewhere along the line I hope you figure out what you're living forever for. What noble purpose you mean to achieve. Because you're no good to anyone here, not even yourselves.
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Self-knowledge can be painful, but not half so damaging as self-ignorance.
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'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.'
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Law can change how people behave when others are watching - that's all.