Orson Scott Card Quotes
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You know, if you hurt people enough, eventually they’ll all call you whatever you want. Maker. King. Captain. Boss. Master. Holy One. Pick your title, you can beat people into calling you that. But you don’t change yourself a bit. All you do is change the meanings of those words, so they all mean the same thing: Bully.
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Last night Alvin just got mad, which she said would only guarantee that he’d stay stupid.
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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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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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Heroes and victims are the product of the mood they were in when opportunity came or when circumstances were at their worst.
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I acted like a human male. When I act like a human male it doesn't make me less human, it just makes me less female.
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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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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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If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how 'important' it is?
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Please open your mind to the possibility that I might be an honest man who was himself deceived.
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Where do you draw the line between a humble man who knows his own weaknesses but tries to act out virtues he hasn’t quite mastered yet, and a proud man who pretends to have those virtues without the slightest intention of acquiring them?
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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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This man, though, was of that rare type that knew what he wanted but didn't want anything badly enough to demand it or beg for it or hurt anyone else in the process of getting it.
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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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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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His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life.
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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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Didn’t he know that when you work to destroy, you invite the Destroyer?
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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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It (i. e., advertising) was like horoscopes-enough blind stabs and some of them are bound to strike a target.
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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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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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A man who can’t read only knows what other folks tell him.
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It is a weak man who blames his failures on the strength of others.