Explore Quotes by Orson Scott Card

The selective voluntary blindness of human beings allows them to ignore the moral consequences of their choices. It has been one of the species' most valuable traits, in terms of the survival of any particular human community.

My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you'll get a different answer.

Ulysses, obviously. It was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.

There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane.

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.

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books.

I don't believe that there are aliens. I believe there are really different people.

God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.

Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.

You who speak languages, you are such liars.

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.

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

So the whole war is because we can't talk to each other.

Soldiers can sometimes make decisions that are smarter than the orders they've been given.

The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.

I hope I am remembered by my children as a good father.

Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.

He would always speak the language of the heart with an awkward foreign accent.

If the other fellow can't tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn't trying to kill you.