Orson Scott Card Quotes
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The great forces of history were real, after a fashion. But when you examined them closely, those great forces always came down to the dreams and hungers and judgments of individuals. The choices they made were real. They mattered.
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He didn’t know if he had the right or not. Didn’t know if he was taking like a Red man, just what the land offered, or stealing like a White man, murdering whatever it pleased him to kill.
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'My religion,' said Ms. Brown, 'is to try to falsify all hypotheses.'
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If something just plain didn’t make sense to Alvin, he didn’t believe it, and no amount of quoting from the Bible would convince him. Now Taleswapper was telling him that he was right to refuse to believe things that made no sense.
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The barrier was only in my mind - which is true of this barrier as well. The more firmly I try to cross the barrier, the more firmly I'm rejected. Well, maybe it's the intention to cross the boundary that pushes me away.
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'I was ordained,' said the preacher. 'No one ordains artists. They ordain themselves.'Just as Taleswapper had expected. The preacher retreated to authority as soon as he feared his ideas could not stand on their own merit. Reasonable argument was impossible when authority became the arbiter.
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Maybe she just wanted to be the one to decide when things happened between them. Then again, what women didn't want to decide that?
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'This is Alvin Smith,' said Cooper. 'He’s a man of inestimable abilities, but only because nobody has cared enough to estimate them.'
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I was the last to know what was happening to me. Or at least I was the last to know that I knew.
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His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life.
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Didn’t he know that when you work to destroy, you invite the Destroyer?
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Not that human beings need to be violent in order to be human, but if you ever lose the will to control, the will to destroy, then it must be because you choose to lose it. My role was not to force you to be gentle and kind; it was to keep you alive while you decided for yourselves what kind of people you wanted to be.
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Why is doubt the one thing we're never skeptical of? We question other peoples' beliefs, and the more sure they are the more we doubt them. But it never occurs to us to doubt our own doubt. Question our own questions. We think our questions are answers.
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Alvin had met true evil in his life, but he still persisted in thinking it was awful rare, and the word was bandied about too much by those who didn’t understand what real badness was.
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She don’t set no store to see a king. Her pa a king back in Africa, and they shoot him dead. Them Portuguese slavers show her what it mean to be a king-it mean you die quick like everybody, and spill blood red like everybody, and cry out loud in pain and scared-oh, fine to be a king, and fine to see one. Do them White folk believe this lie?
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Even the most 'Rational' people - the ones who claimed not to have a religion - were just as chauvinistic about their irreligion, sneering at and ostracizing the believers just the way the believers treated nonmembers of their own groups. It's a human universal.
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My own feeling is that human happiness is a very random thing, and bestows itself willy-nilly, and there’s not much deserving about the matter.
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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.
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When he loved his bride it was not a queen he loved, but rather the girl as she might have been if she had not been destroyed in her childhood.
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Some men are great enough that they can love a whole woman, and not just part of her.
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If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how 'important' it is?
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It (i. e., advertising) was like horoscopes-enough blind stabs and some of them are bound to strike a target.
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That's what survival means, for me. I thought it was a matter of staying alive, but it isn't. Nobody lives forever anyway. It's how you're remembered. It's what your children thought of you, what they think of you after you're dead. That's survival.
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A man who can’t read only knows what other folks tell him.