All Quotes

"I joke that I started as a kid revising the encyclopedia by stickering the one my mother bought."

"education was always a passion in my household ... you know, the very traditional approach to knowledge and learning and establishing that as a base for a good life."

"The more time I spent on the site the more I came to think of Wales as some kind of Queen Ant, letting the vast colony go about its work, at the centre of a system where the knowledge of the community is infinitely larger than the sum of experience of all its individuals."

"Local press die-offs worldwide are robbing Wikipedia of sources to cite, warns co-founder Jimmy Wales. He told the German outlet Spiegel his team's next aim is to reach 'billions' of potential users in poor countries... Jimmy Wales, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, told a German news magazine on Wednesday that declines in centuries-old local press sectors around the world worried him more than even fake news in the "Trump" era... Asked by Spiegel magazine if giants such as Google, Amazon and Facebook should do more to support Wikipedia, Wales replied: "yes perhaps, but we lay great value on our independence." ...Wales was also asked about the greatest problem he would like solved. He said Wikipedia's "greatest challenge" was a growth in the languages of poorer developing countries."

"At 18:54 EST on December 12 John Seigenthaler's wife, who was infuriated at Wikipedia regarding the recent scandal regarding his role in the Kennedy Assassination, came into the house, where Jim was having dinner. Wearing a mask, he [sic] shot him three times in the head and ran,""

"Why do Wikipedians perform these millions of hours of labor, some expended on a giant straw goat, without pay? Because they don't experience them as labor. “It's a misconception people work for free,” Wales told the site Hacker Noon in 2018. “They have fun for free.” A 2011 survey of more than 5,000 Wikipedia contributors listed “It's fun” as one of the primary reasons they edited the site."

"In 2000, 10 months before Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger cofounded Wikipedia, the pair started a site called Nupedia, planning to source articles from noted scholars and put them through seven rounds of editorial oversight. But the site never got off the ground; after a year, there were fewer than two dozen entries. (Wales, who wrote one of them himself, told The New Yorker “it felt like homework.”) When Sanger got wind of a collaborative software tool called a wiki—from the Hawaiian wikiwiki, or “quickly”—he and Wales decided to set one up as a means of generating raw material for Nupedia. They assumed nothing good would come of it, but within a year Wikipedia had 20,000 articles. By the time Nupedia's servers went down a year later, the original site had become a husk, and the seed it carried had grown beyond any expectation... Sanger left Wikipedia in early 2003..."

"At Jimmy Wales' wedding, one of the maids of honor toasted him as the sole internet mogul who wasn't a billionaire."

"“The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.”"

""“Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along--the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires.”"

""That monitor is going to come out today. We're going to take it right out, and it won't hurt a bit." Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn't hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth."

"For a moment, the others backed away and Stilson lay motionless. They were all wondering if he was dead. Ender, however, was trying to figure out a way to forestall vengeance. To keep them from taking him in a pack tomorrow. I have to win this now, and for all time, or I'll fight it every day and it will get worse and worse."

"I'll lie to him." "And if that doesn't work?" "Then I'll tell the truth. We're allowed to do that, in emergencies. We can't plan for everything, you know."

"Ender didn't like fighting. He didn't like Peter's kind, the strong against the weak, and he didn't like his own kind either, the smart against the stupid."

"He toyed with the idea of trying to be like the other boys. But he couldn't think of any jokes, and none of theirs seemed funny. Wherever their laughter came from, Ender couldn't find such a place in himself. He was afraid, and fear made him serious."

"“It isn't the world at stake, Ender. Just us. Just humankind. As far as the rest of the earth is concerned, we could be wiped out and it would adjust, it would get on with the next step in evolution. But humanity doesn't want to die. As a species, we have evolved to survive.""

"As a species, we have evolved to survive. And the way we do that is by straining and straining and, at last, every few generations, giving birth to genius."

"Human beings are free except when humanity needs them."

"He could see Bonzo's anger growing hot. Hot anger was bad. Ender's anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo's was hot, and so it used him."

"So he believed. Believed, but the seed of doubt was there, and it stayed, and every now and then sent out a little root. It changed everything, to have that seed growing. It made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise."

"The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win. Everybody thinks Hitler got to power because of his armies, because they were willing to kill, and that's partly true, because in the real world power is always built on the threat of death and dishonor. But mostly he got to power on words, on the right words at the right time."

"Remember - the enemy's gate is down."

"There was no doubt now in Ender's mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no one would save him from it. Peter might be scum, but Peter had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you."

"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them... I destroy them. -" "You beat them." For a moment she was not afraid of his understanding. "No, you don't understand. I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don't exist."

"Human beings didn't evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing's the first thing we learned. And a good thing we did, or we'd be dead, and the tigers would own the earth."

"If one of us has to be destroyed, let's make damn sure we're the ones alive at the end. Our genes won't let us decide any other way. Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't a will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never decide to cease to exist."

"He had long since learned that when something unusual was going on, something that was part of someone else's plan and not his own, he would find out more information by waiting than by asking. Adults almost always lost their patience before Ender did."

"All right," Ender gasped. "You win." The man's knee thrust painfully downward. "Since when," ask the man, his voice soft and rasping, "do you have to tell the enemy when he has won?"

"I am your enemy, the first one you've ever had who was smarter than you. There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong. And the rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you. I am your enemy from now on. From now I am your teacher."

"Remember, boy. From now on the enemy is more clever than you. From now on the enemy is stronger than you. From now on you are always about to lose." The old man's face grew serious again. "You will be about to lose, Ender, but you will win. You will learn to defeat the enemy. He will teach you how."

"Reverse colonial sci-fi don't always have to be anti-imperialist, though. Ender's Game, both film and book, use the invasion of the superior aliens not as a critique of Western expansion and genocide, but as an excuse for those things. The bugs invade human worlds, and the consequence is that the humans must utterly annihilate the alien enemy, even if Ender feels kind of bad about it."

"What works with Ender's Game is Ender's community-building. There's a disparate group of kids who could be rivals, and he's able to bind them together through his personal service to them, through his loyalty, his trustworthiness. They know he'll never waste them, that he's not exploiting them for his own gain. I certainly was not conscious of it as I was writing him—I'm not much of a follower, and I'm not a good team player—and yet I created the kind of guy that I would follow."

"As it's written, Ender's Game is adaptable. The book takes place entirely inside Ender's head. If you don't know what Ender is thinking, he's just an incredibly violent little kid and not terribly interesting. You have to find ways to externalize what he's thinking. But he can't be the kind of person who explains himself to other people. That would weaken him."

"Le Guin first mentions the Ansible in her novel Rocannon’s World, published in 1966, and the invention of the device itself was a central motif to her 1974 novel, The Dispossessed. The main character of that novel was the inventor. Card, either through laziness or lack of imagination, appropriated Le Guin’s device full-bore and for reasons that have escaped me over the last thirty odd years, is that no one’s complained or cried foul. Indeed, other writers since then have also used the Ansible for their FTL communication needs. If Card had stolen a tune from a song and incorporated it in a song of his own (and consequently made a boat-load of money) without sharing the credit with the original songwriter, he’d have his ass handed to him in a sling in court. This is what happened to M.C. Hammer when he stole a famous riff from Rick James in 1990 for his song, “U Can’t Touch This”. The riff that made the song a world-wide hit (and made Hammer’s career) came from the creative mind of Rick James and it was only after a lengthy court battle did James end up sharing credit for Mr. Hammer’s song. Did Hammer say in court that it was a homage to Rick James? No. Did he say that everyone steals from everyone else in the music business and that it’s no big deal? No."

"That Ender could be tricked into believing a real battle scenario was a game-like video simulation is one of the most believable post-modern twists in modern science fiction, particularly considering how often the difference between our digital and "real" lives is debated and conflated. Ender becomes a "hero" in a supposed video game, something that embodies and magnifies fears about video games, both in 1985 when the book was published and today."

"Sure, people get new jobs, or go to different schools, or grow in prestige. But at no point over the course of the novel do we see a demonstrable growth or change in any of the characters, despite the fact that Ender ages from six to roughly eleven. I'm willing to grant Card the "exceedingly young hero" just because every science fiction novel geared toward young adults — and many that aren't — runs into this problem. But to see no demonstrable character growth just sort of removes the stakes from it. Card in many ways suffers from the same problem that Asimov faced in some of his great novels, the fact that he had a rocking plot concept but his characters were two-dimensional cardboard cutouts just going through the motions to make that awesome plot happen."

"Ender gets to strike out at his enemies and still remain morally clean. Nothing is his fault."

"The word taste has different meanings, which it is easy to mistake. There is a difference between the taste which in certain objects has an attraction for us, and the taste that makes us understand and distinguish the qualities we judge by."

"Eternity and pain, pain and eternity — they are the only two things of which the universe is made."

"The belly is the reason that man does not easily mistake himself for a god."

"To be what you want to be: isn't this the essence of being human?"

"Life moved ever outward into infinite possibilities and yet all things were perfect and finished in every single moment, their end attained."

"Any robot sufficiently intelligent to clean dishes is too intelligent to clean dishes."

"The secret of life is more life."

"Do you want to know the secret of life? Bardo will tell you the secret of life: it's not the amount of time we have, despite what I've just said. No it's not quantity and it's not even quality. It's variety."

"What's beautiful is that a creator can be astonished by his own creations."

"For us humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down."

"I am not interested in things getting better; what I want is more: more human beings, more dreams, more history, more consciousness, more suffering, more joy, more disease, more agony, more rapture, more evolution, more life."

"If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't."

"Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise."