Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Before we are citizens, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty.
Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.
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.
It's about me, or people wouldn't be so anxious to keep me from knowing about it. The absence of information is information. ~ Ender
So I want to ask you a hypothetical question. My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind.
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.
Most victories came from instantly exploiting your enemy's stupid mistakes, and not from any particular brilliance in your own plan.
To expect wickedness from human beings is the best way I know of to avoid surprises. And when I am surprised, it's always pleasantly.
He’d undone all he could. You can be sorry, and you can be forgiven, but you can’t call back the futures that your bad decisions lost
[T]he politically correct are above the rules of ordinary civility, once they have identified you as an unbeliever in their religion.
My father always said that government is like watching another man piss in your boot. Someone feels better but it certainly isn't you.
A weak King must be what other Kings have been; a strong King is himself, and from then on the meaning of the name of King is changed.
The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.
Only stupid men trying to seem smart need to be with dumb women. Only weak men trying to look strong are attracted to compliant women.
Thank you for this, Peter. For dry eyes and silent weeping. You taught me how to hide anything i felt. More than ever, i need that now.
I realized that everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas.
I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.
When I write fiction, I create characters whose views are not my own, and I allow them to be eloquent in defense of their, not my, views.
I've learned much, Father, and this above all: that no station in life is above any other, if it's occupied by someone with a good heart.
If he was a good man, how could he leave me? So he must not be a good man. But if he isn't good, then why does it hurt so much to lose him?
If you asked me to marry you all over again today I'd say yes, said Valentine. And if I had only met you for the first time today, I'd ask.
If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.
...the thing with brothers is, you're supposed to take turns being the keeper. Sometimes you get to sit down and be the brother who is kept.
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.
That's how it goes within a family. You think you know each other so well, and so you don't bother hardly getting to know each other at all.
When both parties are lying and they both know the other party's lying, it comes powerful close to being the same thing as telling the truth.
The society whose citizens are willing to stand and fight is the one with the best chance of surviving long enough for history to even notice.
You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.
The worst thing about the fantasies of the mentally ill is that they're so damned consistent. They never let up. They never give you any rest.
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.
Nobody ever completely means what they say. Even when they think they're telling the truth, there's always something hidden behind their words.
The only process you've mastered is the process of elimination, and the only reason you've mastered that is because you can do it in the toilet.
At last he came to a door, with these words in glowing emeralds: THE END OF THE WORLD He did not hesitate. He opened the door and stepped through.
I think you don't grow up until you stop worrying about other people's purposes or lack of them and find the purposes you believe in for yourself.
Thanks from keeping me from being a liar," said Nikolai. "What?" "About your having diarrhea." "For you I'd get dysentery." "Now that's friendship.
One judge is coughing his life out into bloody handkerchiefs and the other is burying his wife, and you think this is how God answers your prayers?
You take a step, then another. That's the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it's a remaking of your own mind.
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 gross insult.
Maybe we're the fools, for thinking we know things. Maybe humans are the only ones who can deal with the fact that nothing can ever be known at all.
Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.
A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.
Let me be loved like that, by a man who will not replace me with concubines when I'm old and ugly. Let me be loved by a man who loves God more than me.
You’re not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for the greater you are.
The ways of love are strange and hard: The love you want is always barred; The love you have you want to change. The ways of love are hard and strange.
There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good,' to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.
There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good', to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.
As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what “just living” might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.
there were crimes and quarrels, alongside kindness and cooperation; there were people who loved each other and people who did not; it was a human world.