Orson Scott Card - Man Quotes

54 Sourced Quotes

View all Orson Scott Card Quotes
Doesn't it make you wonder about your own sexual identity, not to mention your sanity, that the two women you love are, respectively, a virtual woman existing only in the transient ansible connections between computers and a woman whose soul is in fact that of a man who is the husband of your mother?

Orson Scott Card
The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win.

Orson Scott Card
He didn't know if he had the right or not. Didn't know if he was taking like a Red man, just what the land offered, or stealing like a White man, murdering whatever it pleased him to kill.

Orson Scott Card
Ho said, 'I do not grieve because my feet have been cut off. I grieve because a precious jewel is dubbed a mere stone, and a man of integrity is called a deceiver. This is why I weep.'

Orson Scott Card
Sometimes those who care for the whole community must act in a way that harms the individual. For a good man it never becomes easy and he avoids it when he can; but when people need him to be harsh, he will be harsh indeed, and he won't shrink from it, he'll do it with his own hand and let it be known what he does.

Orson Scott Card
It is a weak man who blames his failures on the strength of others.

Orson Scott Card
Many a man isn't as good as his woman, but I never knew a husband who was better than his wife.

Orson Scott Card
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? Is it just my pride that's wounded?

Orson Scott Card
My father always said that government is like watching another man piss in your boot. Someone feels better but it certainly isn't you.

Orson Scott Card
You're such a liar.
But I'm a beautiful liar, don't you think? She flashed her best smile at her friend.
I don't understand what men see in women anyway, her friend answered. Hexes or no hexes, as long as a woman has her clothes on a man can't see what he's interested in anyhow.

Orson Scott Card
This is Alvin Smith, said Cooper. He's a man of inestimable abilities, but only because nobody has cared enough to estimate them.

Orson Scott Card
Please open your mind to the possibility that I might be an honest man who was himself deceived.

Orson Scott Card
What you are is a man who means to be good, and undo the bad he's done, and that's as good as any man ever gets.

Orson Scott Card
Taleswapper looked at Miller.
I'm nothing, he said.
A Christian isn't nothing, said Taleswapper.
I'm no Christian, either.
Ah, said Taleswapper. A Deist, then, like Tom Jefferson. The children murmured at his mention of the great man's name.
Taleswapper, I'm a father who loves his children, a husband who loves his wife, a farmer who pays his debts, and a miller without a millstone.

Orson Scott Card
This is today's puzzle, he said. If the act of denial can be taken as proof of the crime, how can an innocent man defend himself?
The tithingmen caught him by the arms. Come along now, Mr. Emerson, and don't go trying any philosophy on us.
Oh, I wouldn't dream of it, said Waldo. Philosophy would be wasted against such sturdy-headed men as you.
Glad you know it, said the tithingman proudly. Wouldn't want you thinking we weren't true Christians.

Orson Scott Card
No man can bear to live with a woman who speaks nothing but the truth to him.

Orson Scott Card
And I says back to him, Calvin, sounding like an educated man don't make you educated, and he says back to me, I'd rather be ignorant and sound educated than be educated and sound ignorant, and I said, Why? and he says to me, Because if you sound educated then nobody ever tests you to find out, but if you sound ignorant they never stop.

Orson Scott Card
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!

Orson Scott Card
I always tell what I believe. Whether it's true, I'm no more sure than any man.

Orson Scott Card
I don't hold with prophets, said Alvin. Near as I can tell, they end up just as dead as the next man.

Orson Scott Card
A man who can't read only knows what other folks tell him.

Orson Scott Card
This man, though, was of that rare type that knew what he wanted but didn't want anything badly enough to demand it or beg for it or hurt anyone else in the process of getting it.

Orson Scott Card
Slavery, that was a kind of alchemy for such White folk, or so they reckoned. They calculated a way of turning each bead of a Black man's sweat into gold and each moan of despair from a Black woman's throat into the sweet clear sound of a silver coin ringing on the money-changer's table. There was buying and selling of souls in that place. Yet there was nary a one of them who understood the whole price they paid for owning other folk.

Orson Scott Card
The White man never guessed at what the Red man saw and heard and felt. The White man brought death and emptiness to this place. The White man cut down wise old trees with much to tell; young saplings with many lifetimes of life ahead; and the White man never asked, Will you be glad to make a lodgehouse for me and my tribe? Hack and cut and chop and burn, that was the White man's way. Take from the forest, take from the land, take from the river, but put nothing back. The White man killed animals he didn't need, animals that did him no harm; yet if a bear woke hungry in the winter and took so much as a single young pig, the White man hunted him down and killed him in revenge. He never felt the balance of the land at all.

Orson Scott Card
Nafai knew the rule: when a man acts like a child, he's boyish, and everyone's delighted; when a boy acts the same way, he's childish, and everyone tells him to be a man.

Orson Scott Card
What I am seeing right now is a man who is so dominated by his mother that he is willing to throw away his marriage in order to protect her from the trauma of growing up and acting like an adult.

Orson Scott Card
Where do you draw the line between a humble man who knows his own weaknesses but tries to act out virtues he hasn't quite mastered yet, and a proud man who pretends to have those virtues without the slightest intention of acquiring them?

Orson Scott Card
Road poured out into a place of meadows and a few White man's buildings. Lots of wagons. Horses posted and tied, grazing on the meadow grass. Sounds of metal hammers ringing, chopping of axes in the wood, screech of saws going back and forth, all kinds of White-man forest-killing sounds. A White man's town.

Orson Scott Card
The man who has an intelligent child is doomed to spend his life justifying every decision he makes.

Orson Scott Card
By the time Verily was sixteen, a sturdy and rather good-looking young man of some education and impeccable manners, he had become a thoroughgoing skeptic. If the dogmas about witchery could be so hopelessly wrong, how could any of the teachings of the ministers be relied upon? It left Verily Cooper at loose ends, intellectually speaking, for all his teachers spoke as if religion were the cornerstone of all other learning, and yet all of Verily's actual studies led him to the conclusion that sciences founded upon religion were uncertain at best, utterly bogus at worst.

Orson Scott Card