works-by-orson-scott-card

"If you tell the same lies long enough and loudly enough, even people who know better will despair and concede the point. We are tribal animals. We cannot long stand against the tribe."

"When do you first set foot on the ladder to greatness? Or on the slippery slope of treason? Do you know it at the time? Or do you discover it only looking back?"

"In war planning, you must anticipate the actions of the enemy. Be careful lest your preventive measures teach the enemy which of his possible actions you most fear."

"Only a fool thinks the turns of history can be measured by any standard other than which wars were fought, and who won them. Survival of the fittest—that’s the measure of a civilization. And survival is determined on a battlefield. Where one man kills another, or dies, or runs away. The society whose citizens will stand and fight is the one with the best chance for history even to notice it."

"Treason only matters when it is committed by trusted men."

"War triggers human inventiveness at the most brilliant, because if you don't win your wars, your civilization disappears."

"There are hard wars and easy wars. It's easy to conquer a country whose people hate their own government more than they hate the invaders. It's hard to fight a war when your army knows that back home, their families are rooting for the other side."

"Being young is an eighteen-year prison sentence for a crime your parents committed. But you do get time off for good behavior."

"Heroic love is to do what is best for the loved one, disregarding desire, trust, and cost. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know what is best for anyone."

"Protect your own force—that was a prime concern. But if it were the only priority, or the highest priority, nations would keep their armies at home and never commit them to battle at all."

"While war is the ultimate expression of mistrust, it cannot be waged without absolute trust. A soldier trusts his comrades to stand beside him and his commander to lead him wisely, so that he will not be led to a meaningless death. And the commander trusts his subordinates and soldiers to act with wisdom and courage in order to compensate for his own ignorance, stupidity, incompetence, and fear, which all commanders possess in ample measure."

"Human beings are not designed to keep secrets. Every aspect of our being is shaped for the sharing of information - through speech, gesture, facial expression, posture, and every other deliberate or inadvertent sign of emotion and intent. Thus, it should not surprise us that every would-be dictator, tyrant, conqueror, prophet, colonizer, politician, artist, and dog-catcher in history clearly signaled his intentions long before he acted and in plenty of time for others to prevent them. Neither Hitler nor Churchill, neither Pol Pot nor Abraham Lincoln ever did anything they hadn't told us and shown us they would do. That they are rarely prevented has more to do with our inattention, cowardice, or ambition to ride his coattails than with his particular skill. Dogs might run from the dogcatcher as soon as they see the net, but they rarely tear out his throat and kill him, which is, of course, the only rational course of action for the dog that values its life, liberty, or happiness."

"Praying for rain is such a bad idea. Even in the midst of a terrible drought, someone will say, Of course I want it to rain, but not today. Politics is the art of simultaneously satisfying groups with conflicting goals. The traditional way of accomplishing this is to speak to the groups separately, lie, and then, if you are caught, deny it. You count on the voters to forget or lose interest or change their minds, and they almost always come through for you. In our time, between national television and the internet, contradictions are more easily caught, so not the best method of pleasing everyone is to promise nothing while seeming to promise everything."

"People know many things, and half of them are wrong. If only we knew which half, we'd have reason to be proud of our intelligence. What is knowledge? A belief that is shared by all the respectable people in a community, whether there is any real evidence for it or not. What is faith? A belief that we hold so strongly that we act as if it is true, even though we know there are many who do not believe it. What is opinion? A belief we expect other people to argue with. What is scientific fact? An oxymoron. Science does not deal in facts. It deals in hypotheses, which are never fully and finally correct."

"A ruler's friend's judge him by his achievements, his enemies by the means he used to obtain them."

"A string of unbroken success leads people expect their leaders to be infallible, and when he falls short, they hate him. Complete failures are even worse, for then the leader is seen as weak. He is no longer treated as a factor by his rivals, who immediately move to fill the vacuum. The successful leader is one who is able to convince his people that they are in desperate straits, and only he has the strength and wisdom to keep them safe. Then the trick is never to put this reputation for strength and wisdom to the test. Glorious but untested reputations last forever."

"War will exist as long as any community desires to impose its will on another community more than it desires peace. Coercive men see only slaves and rivals in the world. If the meek refuse war to defend themselves against coercion, then they deserve to be slaves. Peace-lovers can only have what they love by being better at what they hate than those who love war. There is no road to peace that does not pass through war."

"Everything is too long a list to work with. No one knows everything about anything. No one knows something about everything. Everyone knows something about something. Anyone could be the world's foremost expert on something. Anyone who thinks that just because they didn't already know a thing, it must not be true or important, is an idiot."

"...for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane."

"“O my son Absalom,” Bean said softly, knowing for the first time the kind of anguish that could tear such words from a man’s mouth. “my son, my son Absalom. Would God I could die for thee, O Absalom, my son. My sons!”"

"If I had a plan, I'd take control. I have no plan. So for good or ill, it's Ender's game not mine."

"He hadn't realized how much he needed the honor of others until he finally got it."

"The more Sister Carlotta explained it, the less he understood it. Because if there was somebody in charge, then he ought to be fair, and if he wasn't fair, then why should Sister Carlotta be so happy that he was in charge?"

"Analyzing things was fine, but good reflexes could save your life."

"Soldiers do not give the other guy a sporting chance. Soldiers shoot in the back, lay traps and ambushes, lie to the enemy and outnumber the other bastard every chance they get. Your kind of murder only works among civilians."

"Soldiers don't like to lose. And that is why losing is a much more powerful teacher than winning."

"Male and female he created them. Making his image anatomically vague, one must suppose."

"Suddenly a vast eruption licked outward toward the last of the human fighters, Petra' s ships, on which there might or might not still be men alive to see death coming at them. To see their victory approach."

"Fools always look up for power. People above you, they never want to share power with you. Why you look to them? They give you nothing. People below you, you give them hope, you give them respect, they give you power, cause they don't think they have any, so they don't mind giving it up."

"If someone runs after your car, screaming and waving his arms, you know that something significant is intended, even if you can't hear a word he's saying."

"Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia." "But it keeps not ending." "So far, so good."

"Humans will always act to preserve their own lives — except for the times when they don’t."

"Trying to shock nuns is not much sport. There is no trophy."

"Doesn’t it occur to you that the very fact that you’re asking me this question tells me there’s something else for me to figure out, and therefore greatly increases the chance that I will figure it out?"

"Ender was what Bean only wished to be — the kind of person on whom you could put all your hopes, who could carry all your fears, and he would not let you down, would not betray you. I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there."

"Sometimes you have to tell people the truth and ask them to do the thing you want, instead of trying to trick them into it."

"Know, think, choose, do."

"An eye for an eye? How Christian of you." "Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians."

"Bean’s powers of analysis were extraordinary. So, also, were his powers of deception. Some of Bean’s guesses weren’t right — but was that because he didn’t know the truth, or because he simply didn’t want them to know how much he knew, or how much he guessed."

"Ender Wiggin was not larger than life, Bean knew. He was exactly life-sized, and so his larger-than-life burden was too much for him. And yet he was bearing it. So far."

"Please stop reassuring me of how respectful you are whenever you’re about to tell me that I’m an idiot."

"You can’t rule out the impossible, because you never know which of your assumptions about what was possible might turn out, in the real universe, to be false."

"Sometimes the other side is irresistibly strong, and then the only sensible course of action is to retreat in order to save your force to fight another day."

"Most victories came from instantly exploiting your enemy's stupid mistakes, and not from any particular brilliance in your own plan."

"Once they understood our autonomy, the seed of their defeat was sown."

"Isn't that what it means to be civilized? That you can wait to get what you want?"

"He dreamed, as human beings always dreamed — random firings of memory and imagination that the unconscious mind tries to put together into coherent stories."

"Will I die from her mistakes too? No, I'll die from my own damn mistakes!"

"I just... I'm saying that God must have been watching over you." "Yeah. Well, sure. So why didn't he watch over all those dead kids?" "He took them to his heart and loved them." "So then he didn't love me?" "No, he loved you too, he — " "Cause if he was watching so careful, he could have given me something to eat now and then."

"I do give the other guy a chance to learn what he’s doing before I insist on perfection."