Orson Scott Card - Human Quotes

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Even the most introverted person alive is constantly hungry for human association

Orson Scott Card
Miro, I'm so sorry. I always felt such pity for you humans because you could only think of one thing at a time and your memories were so imperfect and... now I realize that just getting through the day without killing somebody can be an achievement." It gets to be a habit. Most of us manage to keep our body count quite low. It's the neighborly way to live.

Orson Scott Card
The only true vision comes not from God but from the inmost recesses of the human mind.

Orson Scott Card
Frozen, right? But to others, it looks like you're calm as could be. That's why some of the others tease you so mercilessly sometimes. They think you're made of stone, and they want to break in and touch the human feelings. They just don't know that when you seem most stony, that's when you're the most frightened and breakable.

Orson Scott Card
There was no name for the disease; his body had gone insane, forgotten the blueprint by which human beings were built. Even now the disease still lives on in his children. Not in our bodies, but in our souls. We exist where normal human children are expected to be; we're even shaped the same. But each of us in our own way has been replaced by an imitation child, shaped out of a twisted, fetid, lipidous goiter that grew out of Father's soul.

Orson Scott Card
Human beings may be miserable specimens, in the main, but we can learn, and, through learning, become decent people.

Orson Scott Card
What else should you be? 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.

Orson Scott Card
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.

Orson Scott Card
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.

Orson Scott Card
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.

Orson Scott Card
The desire to force others to bend or break to her will was always there, usually hidden deeply enough that she could forget she had that wish within her, but occasionally surfacing to dangle the ripe fruit of power just out of her reach. She knew, as few others did, that the power to coerce depended entirely on the fear or weakness of other human beings. It was possible to use coercion, yes, but in the end you found yourself surrounded only by the weak and fearful, with all those of courage and strength arrayed against you.

Orson Scott Card
Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you.

Orson Scott Card
No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.

Orson Scott Card
Humans, in order to rise above the animals, had learned how to convert themselves into nothing more than organs or limbs or even disposable fingernails and hair of a larger metaphorical organism.

Orson Scott Card
Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me—to find out what you're good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools.

Orson Scott Card
That's one of those questions, whether human beings are really capable of change, or if all seeming changes are really a matter of framing the existing character in a different moral situation.

Orson Scott Card
That was interesting, to find that it wasn't hunger that caused children to become bullies on the street. The bulliness was already in the child, and whatever the stakes were, they would find a way to act as they needed to act. … Intelligence and education, which all these children had, apparently didn't make any important difference in human nature.

Orson Scott Card
But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.

Orson Scott Card
I want to see the king.
Wonderful. I'm glad for you.
Why are you so glad?
Because it's good for every human being to have an unfulfilled wish. It makes all of life so poignant.

Orson Scott Card
Human beings do metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered.

Orson Scott Card
Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind," Jane intoned. "Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head.

Orson Scott Card
I walked down the hill, forgot philosophy, and joined the human race again. Nobody was particularly glad to see me.

Orson Scott Card
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.

Orson Scott Card
A lot of human behavior was really acting out our responses to dangers long past.

Orson Scott Card
Humans invent an imaginary lover and put that mask over the face of the body in their bed. That is the tragedy of language my friend. Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong.

Orson Scott Card
Surely you're not saying that God had to choose between long life and intelligence for human beings! It's there in your own Bible, Carlotta. Two trees - knowledge and life. You eat of the tree of knowledge and you will surely die. You eat of the tree of life and you remain a child in the garden forever, undying.

Orson Scott Card
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.

Orson Scott Card
Personal humiliation was painful. Humiliation of one's family was much worse. Humiliation of one's social status was agony to bear. But humiliation of one's nation was the most excruciating of human miseries.

Orson Scott Card
What is the White man? What does he do?
The White man is like a human being, but he crushes all other living things under his feet.
Then why, O Ta-Kumsaw, when I look into your heart, why is it that you do not wish to hurt the White man, that you do not wish to kill the White man?
The White man doesn't know the evil that he does. The White man doesn't feel the peace of the land, so how can he tell the little deaths he makes? I can't blame the White man. But I can't let him stay. So when I make him leave this land, I won't hate him.

Orson Scott Card
Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive. That's a lie. No. It's just a half truth. You can worry about the other half after we win this war.

Orson Scott Card